THE    TOUCHSTONE 


THE   TOUCHSTONE 

BY  EDITH  WHARTON 
AUTHOR  OF  THE 
GREATER  INCLINATION 


CHARLES     SCRIBNER'S 
SONS,    NEW    YORK:   1900 


Copyright,  1900,  by  Charles  Scribners  Sons 


D.  B.  Updike,  The  Merrymount  Press,  Boston 


i 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

I 

PROFESSOR  JOSLIN,  who,  as  our  readers  are  doubt 
less  aware,  is  engaged  in  writing  the  life  of  Mrs.  Au- 
byn,  asks  us  to  state  that  he  will  be  greatly  indebted 
"  to  any  of  the  famous  novelist's  friends  who  will  furnish  him 
"  with  information  concerning  the  period  previous  to  her  com- 
"  ing  to  England.  Mrs.  Aubyn  had  so  few  intimate  friends, 
"  and  consequently  so  few  regular  correspondents,  that  letters 
"  will  be  of  special  value.  Professor  Joslin's  address  is  10  Au- 
"  gusta  Gardens,  Kensington,  and  he  begs  us  to  say  that  he 
"  will  promptly  return  any  documents  entrusted  to  him." 

GLENNARD  dropped  the  Spectator  and  sat  look 
ing  into  the  fire.  The  club  was  filling  up,  but  he 
still  had  to  himself  the  small  inner  room  with  itsj 
darkening  outlook  down  the  rain-streaked  pros-/ 
pect  of  Fifth  Avenue.  It  was  all  dull  and  dismal 
enough,  yet  a  moment  earlier  his  boredom  had  been 
perversely  tinged  by  a  sense  of  resentment  at  the 
thought  that,  as  things  were  going,  he  might  in 
time  have  to  surrender  even  the  despised  privilege 
of  boring  himself  within  those  particular  four  walls. 

m 


226656 


UCHSTONE 

It  was  not  that  he  cared  much  for  the  club,  but 
that  the  remote  contingency  of  having  to  give  it 
up  stood  to  him,  just  then,  perhaps  by  very  reason 
of  its  insignificance  and  remoteness,  for  the  symbol 
of  his  increasing  abnegations ;  of  that  perpetual 
paring-off  that  was  gradually  reducing  existence  to 
the  naked  business  of  keeping  himself  alive.  It  was  the 
futility  of  his  multiplied  shifts  and  privations  that 
made  them  seem  unworthy  of  a  high  attitude — the 
sense  that,  however  rapidly  he  eliminated  the  super 
fluous,  his  cleared  horizon  was  likely  to  offer  no  nearer 
view  of  the  one  prospect  toward  which  he  strained. 
To  give  up  things  in  order  to  marry  the  woman  one 
loves  is  easier  than  to  give  them  up  without  being 
brought  appreciably  nearer  to  such  a  conclusion. 

Through  the  open  door  he  saw  young  Hollings- 
worth  rise  with  a  yawn  from  the  ineffectual  solace  of 
a  brandy-and-soda  and  transport  his  purposeless  per 
son  to  the  window.  Glennard  measured  his  course 
with  a  contemptuous  eye.  It  was  so  like  Hollings- 
worth  to  get  up  and  look  out  of  the  window  just  as 
it  was  growing  too  dark  to  see  anything  !  There  was 
[*] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

a  man  rich  enough  to  do  what  he  pleased — had  he 
been  capable  of  being  pleased — yet  barred  from  all 
conceivable  achievement  by  his  own  impervious  dul- 
ness;  while,  a  few  feet  off,  Glennard,  who  wanted 
only  enough  to  keep  a  decent  coat  on  his  back  and  a 
roof  over  the  head  of  the  woman  he  loved — Glennard, 
who  had  sweated,  toiled,  denied  himself  for  the  scant 
measure  of  opportunity  that  his  zeal  would  have  con 
verted  into  a  kingdom — sat  wretchedly  calculating 
that,  even  when  he  had  resigned  from  the  club,  and 
knocked  off  his  cigars,  and  given  up  his  Sundays  out 
of  town,  he  would  still  be  no  nearer  to  attainment. 

The  Spectator  had  slipped  to  his  feet,  and  as  he 
picked  it  up  his  eye  fell  again  on  the  paragraph  ad 
dressed  to  the  friends  of  Mrs.  Aubyn.  He  had  read 
it  for  the  first  time  with  a  scarcely  perceptible  quick 
ening*  of  attention :  her  name  had  so  long  been  pub 
lic  property  that  his  eye  passed  it  unseeingly,  as  the 
crowd  in  the  street  hurries  without  a  glance  by  some 
familiar  monument. 

"Information  concerning  the  period  previous  to 
her  coming  to  England.  ..."  The  words  were  an 
[3] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

evocation.  He  saw  her  again  as  she  had  looked  at 
their  first  meeting,  the  poor  woman  of  genius  with 
her  long  pale  face  and  short-sighted  eyes,  softened  a 
little  by  the  grace  of  youth  and  inexperience,  but  so 
incapable  even  then  of  any  hold  upon  the  pulses. 
When  she  spoke,  indeed,  she  was  wonderful,  more 
wonderful,  perhaps,  than  when  later,  to  Glennard's 
fancy  at  least,  the  consciousness  of  memorable  things 
uttered  seemed  to  take  from  even  her  most  intimate 
speech  the  perfect  bloom  of  privacy.  It  was  in  those 
earliest  days,  if  ever,  that  he  had  come  near  loving 
her ;  though  even  then  his  sentiment  had  lived  only 
in  the  intervals  of  its  expression.  Later,  when  to  be 
loved  by  her  had  been  a  state  to  touch  any  man's 
imagination,  the  physical  reluctance  had,  inexplica 
bly,  so  overborne  the  intellectual  attraction,  that  the 
last  years  had  been,  to  both  of  them,  an  agony  of 
conflicting  impulses.  Even  now,  if,  in  turning  over 
old  papers  his  hand  lit  on  her  letters,  the  touch  filled 
him  with  inarticulate  misery.  .  .  . 

"  She  had  so  few  intimate  friends  .  .  .  that  letters 
will  be  of  special  value."  So  few  intimate  friends  ! 
[4] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

For  years  she  had  had  but  one ;  one  who  in  the  last 
years  had  requited  her  wonderful  pages,  her  tragic 
outpourings  of  love,  humility  and  pardon,  with  the 
scant  phrases  by  which  a  man  evades  the  vulgarest 
of  sentimental  importunities.  He  had  been  a  brute 
in  spite  of  himself,  and  sometimes,  now  that  the  re 
membrance  of  her  face  had  faded,  and  only  her  voice 
and  words  remained  with  him,  he  chafed  at  his  own  j 
inadequacy,  his  stupid  inability  to  rise  to  the  height  i 
of  her  passion.  His  egoism  was  not  of  a  kind  to 
mirror  its  complacency  in  the  adventure.  To  have 
been  loved  by  the  most  brilliant  woman  of  her  day, 
and  to  have  been  incapable  of  loving  her,  seemed  to 
him,  in  looking  back,  derisive  evidence  of  his  limita 
tions  ;  and  his  remorseful  tenderness  for  her  memory 
was  complicated  with  a  sense  of  irritation  against 
her  for  having  given  him  once  for  all  the  measure 
of  his  emotional  capacity.  It  was  not  often,  however, 
that  he  thus  probed  the  past.  The  public,  in  taking 
possession  of  Mrs.  Aubyn,  had  eased  his  shoulders 
of  their  burden.  There  was  something  fatuous  in  an 
attitude  of  sentimental  apology  toward  a  memory 

[5] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

already  classic :  to  reproach  one's  self  for  not  having 
loved  Margaret  Aubyn  was  a  good  deal  like  being 
disturbed  by  an  inability  to  admire  the  Venus  of 
Milo.  From  her  cold  niche  of  fame  she  looked  down 
ironically  enough  on  his  self-flagellations.  ...  It 
was  only  when  he  came  on  something  that  belonged 
to  her  that  he  felt  a  sudden  renewal  of  the  old  feel 
ing,  the  strange  dual  impulse  that  drew  him  to  her 
voice  but  drove  him  from  her  hand,  so  that  even 
now,  at  sight  of  anything  she  had  touched,  his  heart 
contracted  painfully.  It  happened  seldom  nowadays. 
Her  little  presents,  one  by  one,  had  disappeared  from 
his  rooms,  and  her  letters,  kept  from  some  unac 
knowledged  puerile  vanity  in  the  possession  of  such 
treasures,  seldom  came  beneath  his  hand.  .  .  . 

"  Her  letters  will  be  of  special  value — "  Her  let 
ters  !  Why,  he  must  have  hundreds  of  them — enough 
to  fill  a  volume.  Sometimes  it  used  to  seem  to  him 
that  they  came  with  every  post — he  used  to  avoid 
looking  in  his  letter-box  when  he  came  home  to  his 
rooms — but  her  writing  seemed  to  spring  out  at  him 
as  he  put  his  key  in  the  door. 
[6] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

He  stood  up  and  strolled  into  the  other  room. 
Hollingsworth,  lounging  away  from  the  window,  had 
joined  himself  to  a  languidly  convivial  group  of  men, 
to  whom,  in  phrases  as  halting  as  though  they  strug-  f 
gled  to  define  an  ultimate  idea,  he  was  expounding 
the  cursed  nuisance  of  living  in  a  hole  with  such  a 
damned  climate  that  one  had  to  get  out  of  it  by 
February,  with  the  contingent  difficulty  of  there  be 
ing  no  place  to  take  one's  yacht  to  in  winter  but 
that  other  played-out  hole,  the  Riviera.  From  the 
outskirts  of  this  group  Glennard  wandered  to  an 
other,  where  a  voice  as  different  as  possible  from 
Hollingsworth's  colorless  organ  dominated  another 
circle  of  languid  listeners. 

"  Come  and  hear  Dinslow  talk  about  his  patent : 
admission  free,"  one  of  the  men  sang  out  in  a  tone 
of  mock  resignation. 

Dinslow  turned  to  Glennard  the  confident  pug 
nacity  of  his  smile.  "Give  it  another  six  months  and 
it'll  be  talking  about  itself,"  he  declared.  "It's  pretty 
nearly  articulate  now." 

"Can  it  say  papa  ?  "  someone  else  inquired. 

m 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

Dinslow's  smile  broadened.  "You'll  be  deuced 
glad  to  say  papa  to  it  a  year  from  now,"  he  retorted. 
"  It  '11  be  able  to  support  even  you  in  affluence.  Look 
here,  now,  just  let  me  explain  to  you — " 

Glennard  moved  away  impatiently.  The  men  at 
the  club — all  but  those  who  were  "in  it" — were 
proverbially  "tired"  of  Dinslow's  patent,  and  none 
more  so  than  Glennard,  whose  knowledge  of  its 
merits  made  it  loom  large  in  the  depressing  cata 
logue  of  lost  opportunities.  The  relations  between 
the  two  men  had  always  been  friendly,  and  Dinslow's 
urgent  offers  to  "take  him  in  on  the  ground  floor" 
\  had  of  late  intensified  Glennard's  sense  of  his  own 
inability  to  meet  good  luck  half-way.  Some  of  the 
men  who  had  paused  to  listen  were  already  in  even 
ing  clothes,  others  on  their  way  home  to  dress ;  and 
Glennard,  with  an  accustomed  twinge  of  humiliation, 
said  to  himself  that  if  he  lingered  among  them  it 
was  in  the  miserable  hope  that  one  of  the  number 
might  ask  him  to  dine.  Miss  Trent  had  told  him 
that  she  was  to  go  to  the  opera  that  evening  with 
her  rich  aunt;  and  if  he  should  have  the  luck  to  pick 

[8] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

up  a  dinner  invitation  he  might  join  her  there  with 
out  extra  outlay. 

He  moved  about  the  room,  lingering  here  and 
there  in  a  tentative  affectation  of  interest;  but 
though  the  men  greeted  him  pleasantly,  no  one 
asked  him  to  dine.  Doubtless  they  were  all  engaged, 
these  men  who  could  afford  to  pay  for  their  dinners, 
who  did  not  have  to  hunt  for  invitations  as  a  beggar 
rummages  for  a  crust  in  an  ash-barrel !  But  no — 
as  Hollingsworth  left  the  lessening  circle  about  the 
table,  an  admiring  youth  called  out,  "Holly,  stop 
and  dine ! " 

Hollingsworth  turned  on  him  the  crude  counte 
nance  that  looked  like  the  wrong  side  of  a  more 
finished  face.  "Sony  I  can't.  I'm  in  for  a  beastly 
banquet." 

Glennard  threw  himself  into  an  arm-chair.  Why 
go  home  in  the  rain  to  dress  ?  It  was  folly  to  take 
a  cab  to  the  opera,  it  was  worse  folly  to  go  there 
at  all.  His  perpetual  meetings  with  Alexa  Trent 
were  as  unfair  to  the  girl  as  they  were  unnerving 
to  himself.  Since  he  could  n't  marry  her,  it  was  time 
[9] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

to  stand  aside  and  give  a  better  man  the  chance — 
and  his  thought  admitted  the  ironical  implication 
that  in  the  terms  of  expediency  the  phrase  might 
stand  for  Hollingsworth. 


[10] 


H 


II 

E  dined  alone  and  walked  home  to  his  rooms 

in  the  rain.  As  he  turned  into  Fifth  Avenue 

\  y 
he  caught  the  wet  gleam  of  carriages  on  their  way 

to  the  opera,  and  he  took  the  first  side  street,  in  a 

\ 
moment  of  irritation  against  the  petty  restrictions 

that  thwarted  every  impulse.  It  was  ridiculous  to 
give  up  the  opera,  not  because  one  might  possibly 
be  bored  there,  but  because  one  must  pay  for  the 
experiment. 

In  his  sitting-room,  the  tacit  connivance  of  the 
inanimate  had  centred  the  lamplight  on  a  photo 
graph  of  Alexa  Trent,  placed,  in  the  obligatory  ~) 
silver  frame,  just  where,  as  memory  officiously  re 
minded  him,  Margaret  Aubyn's  picture  had  long 
throned  in  its  stead.  Miss  Trent's  features  cruelly 
justified  the  usurpation.  She  had  the  kind  of  beauty 
that  comes  of  a  happy  accord  of  face  and  spirit.  It  is 
not  given  to  many  to  have  the  lips  and  eyes  of  their 
rarest  mood,  and  some  women  go  through  life  be 
hind  a  mask  expressing  only  their  anxiety  about  the 
butcher's  bill  or  their  inability  to  see  a  joke.  With 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

Miss  Trent,  face  and  mind  had  the  same  high  serious 
contour.  She  looked  like  a  throned  Justice  by  some 
grave  Florentine  painter ;  and  it  seemed  to  Glennard 
that  her  most  salient  attribute,  or  that  at  least  to 
which  her  conduct  gave  most  consistent  expression, 
was  a  kind  of  passionate  justness — the  intuitive  femi 
nine  justness  that  is  so  much  rarer  than  a  reasoned 
impartiality.  Circumstances  had  tragically  combined 
to  develop  this  instinct  into  a  conscious  habit.  She 
had  seen  more  than  most  girls  of  the  shabby  side  of 
life,  of  the  perpetual  tendency  of  want  to  cramp  the 
noblest  attitude.  Poverty  and  misfortune  had  over 
hung  her  childhood,  and  she  had  none  of  the  pretty 
delusions  about  life  that  are  supposed  to  be  the 
crowning  grace  of  girlhood.  This  very  competence, 
which  gave  her  a  touching  reasonableness,  made  Glen- 
nardns  situation  more  difficult  than  if  he  had  aspired 
to  a  princess.  Between  them  they  asked  so  little — 
they  knew  so  well  how  to  make  that  little  do;  but 
they  understood  also,  and  she  especially  did  not  for 
a  moment  let  him  forget,  that  without  that  little  the 
future  they  dreamed  of  was  impossible. 
[12] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

The  sight  of  her  photograph  quickened  Glen- 
narcTs  exasperation.  He  was  sick  and  ashamed  of  the 
part  he  was  playing.  He  had  loved  her  now  for  two 
years,  with  the  tranquil  tenderness  that  gathers 
depth  and  volume  as  it  nears  fulfilment;  he  knew 
that  she  would  wait  for  him — but  the  certitude  was 
an  added  pang.  There  are  times  when  the  constancy 
of  the  woman  one  cannot  marry  is  almost  as  trying 
as  that  of  the  woman  one  does  not  want  to. 

Glennard  turned  up  his  reading-lamp  and  stirred 
the  fire.  He  had  a  long  evening  before  him,  and  he 
wanted  to  crowd  out  thought  with  action.  He  had 
brought  some  papers  from  his  office  and  he  spread 
them  out  on  his  table  and  squared  himself  to  the 
task.  .  .  . 

It  must  have  been  an  hour  later  that  he  found 
himself  automatically  fitting  a  key  into  a  locked 
drawer.  He  had  no  more  notion  than  a  somnambu 
list  of  the  mental  process  that  had  led  up  to  this 
action.  He  was  just  dimly  aware  of  having  pushed 
aside  the  papers  and  the  heavy  calf  volumes  that 
a  moment  before  had  bounded  his  horizon,  and  of 
[13] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

laying  in  their  place,  without  a  trace  of  conscious 
volition,  the  parcel  he  had  taken  from  the  drawer. 

The  letters  were  tied  in  packets  of  thirty  or  forty. 
There  were  a  great  many  packets.  On  some  of  the 
envelopes  the  ink  was  fading;  on  others,  which 
bore  the  English  postmark,  it  was  still  fresh.  She 
had  been  dead  hardly  three  years,  and  she  had 
written,  at  lengthening  intervals,  to  the  last.  .  .  . 

He  undid  one  of  the  early  packets — little  notes 
written  during  their  first  acquaintance  at  Hill- 
bridge.  Glennard,  on  leaving  college,  had  begun 
life  in  his  uncle's  law  office  in  the  old  university 
town.  It  was  there  that,  at  the  house  of  her  father, 
Professor  Forth,  he  had  first  met  the  young  lady 
then  chiefly  distinguished  for  having,  after  two 
years  of  a  conspicuously  unhappy  marriage,  re 
turned  to  the  protection  of  the  paternal  roof. 

Mrs.  Aubyn  was  at  that  time  an  eager  and 
somewhat  tragic  young  woman,  of  complex  mind 
and  undeveloped  manners,  whom  her  crude  experi 
ence  of  matrimony  had  fitted  out  with  a  stock  of 
generalizations  that  exploded  like  bombs  in  the 
[14] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

academic  air  of  Hillbridge.  In  her  choice  of  a  hus 
band  she  had  been  fortunate  enough,  if  the  paradox 
be  permitted,  to  light  on  one  so  signally  gifted  with 
the  faculty  of  putting  himself  in  the  wrong  that 
her  leaving  him  had  the  dignity  of  a  manifesto — 
made  her,  as  it  were,  the  spokeswoman  of  outraged 
wifehood.  In  this  light  she  was  cherished  by  that 
dominant  portion  of  Hillbridge  society  which  was 
least  indulgent  to  conjugal  differences,  and  which 
found  a  proportionate  pleasure  in  being  for  once 
able  to  feast  openly  on  a  dish  liberally  seasoned 
with  the  outrageous.  So  much  did  this  endear  Mrs. 
Aubyn  to  the  university  ladies,  that  they  were  dis 
posed  from  the  first  to  allow  her  more  latitude  of 
speech  and  action  than  the  ill-used  wife  was  gener 
ally  accorded  in  Hillbridge,  where  misfortune  was 
still  regarded  as  a  visitation  designed  to  put  people 
in  their  proper  place  and  make  them  feel  the  superi 
ority  of  their  neighbors.  The  young  woman  so  privi 
leged  combined  with  a  kind  of  personal  shyness  an 
intellectual  audacity  that  was  like  a  deflected  im 
pulse  of  coquetry :  one  felt  that  if  she  had  been 
[15] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

prettier  she  would  have  had  emotions  instead  of 
ideas.  She  was  in  fact  even  then  what  she  had 
always  remained :  a  genius  capable  of  the  acutest 
generalizations,  but  curiously  undiscerning  where 
her  personal  susceptibilities  were  concerned.  Her 
psychology  failed  her  just  where  it  serves  most 
women,  and  one  felt  that  her  brains  would  never 
be  a  guide  to  her  heart.  Of  all  this,  however,  Glen- 
nard  thought  little  in  the  first  year  of  their  ac 
quaintance.  He  was  at  an  age  when  all  the  gifts 
and  graces  are  but  so  much  undiscriminated  food 
to  the  ravening  egoism  of  youth.  In  seeking  Mrs. 
Aubyn's  company  he  was  prompted  by  an  intuitive 
taste  for  the  best  as  a  pledge  of  his  own  superiority. 
The  sympathy  of  the  cleverest  woman  in  Hillbridge 
was  balm  to  his  craving  for  distinction ;  it  was  pub 
lic  confirmation  of  his  secret  sense  that  he  was  cut 
out  for  a  bigger  place.  It  must  not  be  understood 
that  Glennard  was  vain.  Vanity  contents  itself  with 
the  coarsest  diet ;  there  is  no  palate  so  fastidious  as 
that  of  self-distrust.  To  a  youth  of  Glennard's  as 
pirations  the  encouragement  of  a  clever  woman  stood 
[16] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

for  the  symbol  of  all  success.  Later,  when  he  had 
begun  to  feel  his  way,  to  gain  a  foothold,  he  would 
not  need  such  support;  but  it  served  to  carry  him 
lightly  and  easily  over  what  is  often  a  period  of 
insecurity  and  discouragement. 

It  would  be  unjust,  however,  to  represent  his  in 
terest  in  Mrs.  Aubyn  as  a  matter  of  calculation.  It 
was  as  instinctive  as  love,  and  it  missed  being  love 
by  just  such  a  hair-breadth  deflection  from  the  line 
of  beauty  as  had  determined  the  curve  of  Mrs.  Au- 
byn's  lips.  When  they  met  she  had  just  published 
her  first  novel,  and  Glennard,  who  afterward  had  an 
ambitious  man's  impatience  of  distinguished  women, 
was  young  enough  to  be  dazzled  by  the  semi-pub 
licity  it  gave  her.  It  was  the  kind  of  book  that  makes 
elderly  ladies  lower  their  voices  and  call  each  other 
"my  dear11  when  they  furtively  discuss  it ;  and  Glen 
nard  exulted  in  the  superior  knowledge  of  the  world 
that  enabled  him  to  take  as  a  matter  of  course  sen 
timents  over  which  the  university  shook  its  head. 
Still  more  delightful  was  it  to  hear  Mrs.  Aubyn 
waken  the  echoes  of  academic  drawing-rooms  with 
[17] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

audacities  surpassing  those  of  her  printed  page.  Her 
intellectual  independence  gave  a  touch  of  comrade 
ship  to  their  intimacy,  prolonging  the  illusion  of 
college  friendships  based  on  a  joyous  interchange  of 
heresies.  Mrs.  Aubyn  and  Glennard  represented  to 
each  other  the  augur's  wink  behind  the  Hillbridge 
idol :  they  walked  together  in  that  light  of  young 
omniscience  from  which  fate  so  curiously  excludes 
one's  elders. 

Husbands,  who  are  notoriously  inopportune,  may 
even  die  inopportunely,  and  this  was  the  revenge 
that  Mr.  Aubyn,  some  two  years  after  her  return  to 
Hillbridge,  took  upon  his  injured  wife.  He  died  pre 
cisely  at  the  moment  when  Glennard  was  beginning 
to  criticise  her.  It  was  not  that  she  bored  him ;  she 
did  what  was  infinitely  worse — she  made  him  feel 
his  inferiority.  The  sense  of  mental  equality  had 
been  gratifying  to  his  raw  ambition ;  but  as  his  self- 
knowledge  defined  itself,  his  understanding  of  her 
also  increased ;  and  if  man  is  at  times  indirectly  flat 
tered  by  the  moral  superiority  of  woman,  her  mental 
ascendency  is  extenuated  by  no  such  oblique  tribute 
[18] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

to  his  powers.  The  attitude  of  looking  up  is  a  strain 
on  the  muscles ;  and  it  was  becoming  more  and  more 
Glennard's  opinion  that  brains,  in  a  woman,  should 
be  merely  the  obverse  of  beauty.  To  beauty  Mrs. 
Aubyn  could  lay  no  claim ;  and  while  she  had 
enough  prettiness  to  exasperate  him  by  her  inca 
pacity  to  make  use  of  it,  she  seemed  invincibly  igno 
rant  of  any  of  the  little  artifices  whereby  women  con 
trive  to  hide  their  defects  and  even  to  turn  them 
into  graces.  Her  dress  never  seemed  a  part  of  her ;  ""T 
all  her  clothes  had  an  impersonal  air,  as  though  they 
had  belonged  to  someone  else  and  been  borrowed  in 
an  emergency  that  had  somehow  become  chronic. 
She  was  conscious  enough  of  her  deficiencies  to  try  to 
amend  them  by  rash  imitations  of  the  most  approved 
models ;  but  no  woman  who  does  not  dress  well  in 
tuitively  will  ever  do  so  by  the  light  of  reason,  and 
Mrs.  Aubyn's  plagiarisms,  to  borrow  a  metaphor  of 
her  trade,  somehow  never  seemed  to  be  incorporated 
with  the  text. 

Genius  is  of  small  use  to  a  woman  who  does  not 
know  how  to  do  her  hair.  The  fame  that  came  to 
[19] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

Mrs.  Aubyn  with  her  second  book  left  GlennarcPs 
imagination  untouched,  or  had  at  most  the  negative 
effect  of  removing  her  still  farther  from  the  circle  of 
his  contracting  sympathies.  We  are  all  the  sport  of 
time ;  and  fate  had  so  perversely  ordered  the  chro 
nology  of  Margaret  Aubyn's  romance  that  when  her 
husband  died  Glennard  felt  as  though  he  had  lost  a 
friend. 

It  was  not  in  his  nature  to  be  needlessly  unkind ; 
and  though  he  was  in  the  impregnable  position  of 
the  man  who  has  given  a  woman  no  more  definable 
claim  on  him  than  that  of  letting  her  fancy  that  he 
loves  her,  he  would  not  for  the  world  have  accentu 
ated  his  advantage  by  any  betrayal  of  indifference. 
During  the  first  year  of  her  widowhood  their  friend 
ship  dragged  on  with  halting  renewals  of  sentiment, 
becoming  more  and  more  a  banquet  of  empty  dishes 
from  which  the  covers  were  never  removed;  then 
Glennard  went  to  New  York  to  live  and  exchanged 
the  faded  pleasures  of  intercourse  for  the  compara 
tive  novelty  of  correspondence.  Her  letters,  oddly 
enough,  seemed  at  first  to  bring  her  nearer  than  her 
[20] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

presence.  She  had  adopted,  and  she  successfully  main 
tained,  a  note  as  affectionately  impersonal  as  his  own; 
she  wrote  ardently  of  her  work,  she  questioned  him 
about  his,  she  even  bantered  him  on  the  inevitable 
pretty  girl  who  was  certain  before  long  to  divert  the, 
current  of  his  confidences.  To  Glennard,  who  watf 

almost  a  stranger  in  New  York,  the  sight  of  Mrs! 

f 
Aubyn's  writing  was  like  a  voice  of  reassurance  ity 

1; 
surroundings  as  yet  insufficiently  aware  of  him.  His 

vanity  found  a  retrospective  enjoyment  in  the  senti 
ment  his  heart  had  rejected,  and  this  factitious  emo 
tion  drove  him  once  or  twice  to  Hillbridge,  whence, 
after  scenes  of  evasive  tenderness,  he  returned  dissat 
isfied  with  himself  and  her.  As  he  made  room  fbrf 
himself  in  New  York  and  peopled  the  space  he  had 
cleared  with  the  sympathies  at  the  disposal  of  agree-  ; 
able  and  self-confident  young  men,  it  seemed  to  him 
natural  to  infer  that  Mrs.  Aubyn  had  refurnished  in 
the  same  manner  the  void  he  was  not  unwilling  his 
departure  should  have  left.  But  in  the  dissolution  of 
sentimental  partnerships  it  is  seldom  that  both  asso 
ciates  are  able  to  withdraw  their  funds  at  the  same 
[21] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

time ;  and  Glennard  gradually  learned  that  he  stood 
for  the  venture  on  which  Mrs.  Aubyn  had  irretriev 
ably  staked  her  all.  It  was  not  the  kind  of  figure  he 
cared  to  cut.  He  had  no  fancy  for  leaving  havoc  in 
his  wake  and  would  have  preferred  to  sow  a  quick 
growth  of  oblivion  in  the  spaces  wasted  by  his  un- 
-*  considered  inroads ;  but  if  he  supplied  the  seed,  it 
was  clearly  Mrs.  Aubyn's  business  to  see  to  the  rais 
ing  of  the  crop.  Her  attitude  seemed  indeed  to  throw 
his  own  reasonableness  into  distincter  relief;  so  that 
they  might  have  stood  for  thrift  and  improvidence 
in  an  allegory  of  the  affections. 

It  was  not  that  Mrs.  Aubyn  permitted  herself  to 
be  a  pensioner  on  his  bounty.  He  knew  she  had  no 
wish  to  keep  herself  alive  on  the  small  change  of  sen- 
-jtiment;  she  simply  fed  on  her  own  funded  passion, 
and  the  luxuries  it  allowed  her  made  him,  even  then, 
;  dimly  aware  that  she  had  the  secret  of  an  inexhausti 
ble  alchemy. 

Their  relations  remained  thus  negatively  tender 
till  she  suddenly  wrote  him  of  her  decision  to  go 
abroad  to  live.  Her  father  had  died,  she  had  no 
[22] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

near  ties  in  Hillbridge,  and  London  offered  more 
scope  than  New  York  to  her  expanding  personality. 
She  was  already  famous,  and  her  laurels  were  yet  un- 
harvested. 

For  a  moment  the  news  roused  Glennard  to  a 
jealous  sense  of  lost  opportunities.  He  wanted,  at 
any  rate,  to  reassert  his  power  before  she  made  the 
final  effort  of  escape.  They  had  not  met  for  over  a 
year,  but  of  course  he  could  not  let  her  sail  without 
seeing  her.  She  came  to  New  York  the  day  before 
her  departure,  and  they  spent  its  last  hours  together. 
Glennard  had  planned  no  course  of  action — he  sim 
ply  meant  to  let  himself  drift.  They  both  drifted,  for 
a  long  time,  down  the  languid  current  of  reminis 
cence  ;  she  seemed  to  sit  passive,  letting  him  push 
his  way  back  through  the  overgrown  channels  of  the 
past.  At  length  she  reminded  him  that  they  must 
bring  their  explorations  to  an  end.  He  rose  to  leave, 
and  stood  looking  at  her  with  the  same  uncertainty 
in  his  heart.  He  was  tired  of  her  already — he  was 
always  tired  of  her — yet  he  was  not  sure  that  he 
wanted  her  to  go. 

[23] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"I  may  never  see  you  again,""  he  said,  as  though 
confidently  appealing  to  her  compassion. 

Her  look  enveloped  him.  "And  I  shall  see  you 
always — always !" 

"Why  go  then — ?"  escaped  him. 

"To  be  nearer  you,"  she  answered ;  and  the  words 
dismissed  him  like  a  closing  door. 

The  door  was  never  to  reopen ;  but  through  its 
narrow  crack  Glennard,  as  the  years  went  on,  became 
more  and  more  conscious  of  an  inextinguishable  light 
directing  its  small  ray  toward  the  past  which  con 
sumed  so  little  of  his  own  commemorative  oil.  The 
reproach  was  taken  from  this  thought  by  Mrs. 
Aubyn's  gradual  translation  into  terms  of  univer 
sality.  In  becoming  a  personage  she  so  naturally 
ceased  to  be  a  person  that  Glennard  could  almost 
look  back  to  his  explorations  of  her  spirit  as  on  a 
visit  to  some  famous  shrine,  immortalized,  but  in 
a  sense  desecrated,  by  popular  veneration. 

Her  letters  from  London  continued  to  come  with 
the  same  tender  punctuality ;  but  the  altered  condi 
tions  of  her  life,  the  vistas  of  new  relationships  dis- 
[24] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

closed  by  every  phrase,  made  her  communications  as 
impersonal  as  a  piece  of  journalism.  It  was  as  though 
the  state,  the  world,  indeed,  had  taken  her  off  his 
hands,  assuming  the  maintenance  of  a  temperament 
that  had  long  exhausted  his  slender  store  of  reci 
procity. 

In  the  retrospective  light  shed  by  the  letters  he 
was  blinded  to  their  specific  meaning.  He  was  not 
a  man  who  concerned  himself  with  literature,  and 
they  had  been  to  him,  at  first,  simply  the  extension 
of  her  brilliant  talk,  later  the  dreaded  vehicle  of  a 
tragic  importunity.  He  knew,  of  course,  that  they 
were  wonderful ;  that,  unlike  the  authors  who  give 
their  essence  to  the  public  and  keep  only  a  dry  rind 
for  their  friends,  Mrs.  Aubyn  had  stored  of  her 
rarest  vintage  for  this  hidden  sacrament  of  tender 
ness.  Sometimes,  indeed,  he  had  been  oppressed,  hu 
miliated  almost,  by  the  multiplicity  of  her  allusions, 
the  wide  scope  of  her  interests,  her  persistence  in 
forcing  her  superabundance  of  thought  and  emotion 
into  the  shallow  receptacle  of  his  sympathy ;  but  he 
had  never  thought  of  the  letters  objectively,  as  the 
[25] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

production  of  a  distinguished  woman ;  had  never 
measured  the  literary  significance  of  her  oppressive 
prodigality.  He  was  almost  frightened  now  at  the 
wealth  in  his  hands ;  the  obligation  of  her  love  had 
never  weighed  on  him  like  this  gift  of  her  imagina 
tion  :  it  was  as  though  he  had  accepted  from  her 
something  to  which  even  a  reciprocal  tenderness 
could  not  have  justified  his  claim. 

He  sat  a  long  time  staring  at  the  scattered  pages 
on  his  desk;  and  in  the  sudden  realization  of  what 
they  meant  he  could  almost  fancy  some  alchemistic 
process  changing  them  to  gold  as  he  stared. 

He  had  the  sense  of  not  being  alone  in  the  room, 
of  the  presence  of  another  self  observing  from  with 
out  the  stirring  of  sub-conscious  impulses  that  sent 
flushes  of  humiliation  to  his  forehead.  At  length  he 
stood  up,  and  with  the  gesture  of  a  man  who  wishes 
to  give  outward  expression  to  his  purpose — to  es 
tablish,  as  it  were,  a  moral  alibi — swept  the  letters 
into  a  heap  and  carried  them  toward  the  grate.  But 
it  would  have  taken  too  long  to  burn  all  the  pack 
ets.  He  turned  back  to  the  table  and  one  by  one 
[26] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

fitted  the  pages  into  their  envelopes ;  then  he  tied 
up  the  letters  and  put  them  back  into  the  locked 
drawer. 


[27] 


Ill 

IT  was  one  of  the  laws  of  GlennarcTs  intercourse 
with  Miss  Trent  that  he  always  went  to  see  her 
the  day  after  he  had  resolved  to  give  her  up.  There 
was  a  special  charm  about  the  moments  thus  snatched 
from  the  jaws  of  renunciation;  and  his  sense  of  their 
significance  was  on  this  occasion  so  keen  that  he 
hardly  noticed  the  added  gravity  of  her  welcome. 

His  feeling  for  her  had  become  so  vital  a  part  of 
him  that  her  nearness  had  the  quality  of  impercep 
tibly  readjusting  his  point  of  view,  of  making  the 
jumbled  phenomena  of  experience  fall  at  once  into  a 
rational  perspective.  In  this  redistribution  of  values 
the  sombre  retrospect  of  the  previous  evening  shrank 
to  a  mere  cloud  on  the  edge  of  consciousness.  Per 
haps  the  only  service  an  unloved  woman  can  render 
the  man  she  loves  is  to  enhance  and  prolong  his  il 
lusions  about  her  rival.  It  was  the  fate  of  Margaret 
Aubyn's  memory  to  serve  as  a  foil  to  Miss  Trent's 
presence,  and  never  had  the  poor  lady  thrown  her 
successor  into  more  vivid  relief. 

Miss  Trent  had  the  charm  of  still  waters  that  are 
[28] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

felt  to  be  renewed  by  rapid  currents.  Her  attention 
spread  a  tranquil  surface  to  the  demonstrations  of 
others,  and  it  was  only  in  days  of  storm  that  one 
felt  the  pressure  of  the  tides.  This  inscrutable  com 
posure  was  perhaps  her  chief  grace  in  Glennard's 
eyes.  Reserve,  in  some  natures,  implies  merely  the 
locking  of  empty  rooms  or  the  dissimulation  of  awk 
ward  encumbrances;  but  Miss  Trent's  reticence  was 
to  Glennard  like  the  closed  door  to  the  sanctuary, 
and  his  certainty  of  divining  the  hidden  treasure 
made  him  content  to  remain  outside  in  the  happy 
expectancy  of  the  neophyte. 

"You  did  n't  come  to  the  opera  last  night,"  she 
began,  in  the  tone  that  seemed  always  rather  to  re 
cord  a  fact  than  to  offer  a  reflection  on  it. 

He  answered  with  a  discouraged  gesture.  "What 
was  the  use?  We  couldn't  have  talked." 

"Not  as  well  as  here,"  she  assented ;  adding,  after 
a  meditative  pause,  "As  you  did  n't  come  I  talked  to 
Aunt  Virginia  instead." 

"Ah  !"  he  returned,  the  fact  being  hardly  striking 
enough  to  detach  him  from  the  contemplation  of  her 
[29] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

hands,  which  had  fallen,  as  was  their  wont,  into  an 
attitude  full  of  plastic  possibilities.  One  felt  them  to 
be  hands  that,  moving  only  to  some  purpose,  were 
capable  of  intervals  of  serene  inaction. 

"We  had  a  long  talk,11  Miss  Trent  went  on;  and  she 
waited  again  before  adding,  with  the  increased  absence 
of  stress  that  marked  her  graver  communications, 
"Aunt  Virginia  wants  me  to  go  abroad  with  her.1' 

Glennard  looked  up  with  a  start.  "Abroad? 
When?" 

"Now — next  month.  To  be  gone  two  years.1' 

He  permitted  himself  a  movement  of  tender  deri 
sion.  "Does  she  really?  Well,  I  want  you  to  go 
abroad  with  me — for  any  number  of  years.  Which 
offer  do  you  accept  ?  " 

"Only  one  of  them  seems  to  require  immediate 
consideration,11  she  returned  with  a  smile. 

Glennard  looked  at  her  again.  "You're  not  think 
ing  of  it  ?" 

Her  gaze  dropped  and  she  unclasped  her  hands. 
Her  movements  were  so  rare  that  they  might  have 
been  said  to  italicize  her  words.  "Aunt  Virginia 
[30] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

talked  to  me  very  seriously.  It  will  be  a  great  relief 
to  mother  and  the  others  to  have  me  provided  for 
in  that  way  for  two  years.  I  must  think  of  that,  you 
know."  She  glanced  down  at  her  gown,  which,  under 
a  renovated  surface,  dated  back  to  the  first  days  of 
Glennard's  wooing.  "I  try  not  to  cost  much — but  I 
do." 

"Good  Lord  !"  Glennard  groaned. 

They  sat  silent  till  at  length  she  gently  took  up 
the  argument.  "As  the  eldest,  you  know,  I  'm  bound 
to  consider  these  things.  Women  are  such  a  burden. 
Jim  does  what  he  can  for  mother,  but  with  his  own 
children  to  provide  for  it  is  n't  very  much.  You  see 
we  're  all  poor  together." 

"Your  aunt  is  n't.  She  might  help  your  mother." 

"She  does — in  her  own  way." 

"Exactly — that 's  the  rich  relation  all  over  !  You 
may  be  miserable  in  any  way  you  like,  but  if  you  're 
to  be  happy  you  must  be  so  in  her  way — and  in  her 
old  gowns." 

"I  could  be  very  happy  in  Aunt  Virginia's  old 
gowns,"  Miss  Trent  interposed. 
[31] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"Abroad,  you  mean  ?  " 

"I  mean  wherever  I  felt  that  I  was  helping.  And 
my  going  abroad  will  help.1' 

"Of  course — I  see  that.  And  I  see  your  consider- 
ateness  in  putting  its  advantages  negatively." 

"Negatively?" 

"In  dwelling  simply  on  what  the  going  will  take 
you  from,  not  on  what  it  will  bring  you  to.  It  means 
a  lot  to  a  woman,  of  course,  to  get  away  from  a  life 
like  this."  He  summed  up  in  a  disparaging  glance 
the  background  of  indigent  furniture.  "The  question 
is  how  you  '11  like  coming  back  to  it." 

She  seemed  to  accept  the  full  consequences  of  his 
thought.  "I  only  know  I  don't  like  leaving  it." 

He  flung  back  sombrely,  "You  don't  even  put  it 
conditionally  then  ?  " 

Her  gaze  deepened.  "On  what?" 

He  stood  up  and  walked  across  the  room.  Then  he 
came  back  and  paused  before  her.  "On  the  alterna 
tive  of  marrying  me." 

The  slow  color — even  her  blushes  seemed  deliber 
ate — rose  to  her  lower  lids ;  her  lips  stirred,  but  the 
[32] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

words  resolved  themselves  into  a  smile  and  she  waited. 

He  took  another  turn,  with  the  thwarted  step  of 
the  man  whose  nervous  exasperation  escapes  through 
his  muscles. 

"And  to  think  that  in  fifteen  years  I  shall  have  a 
big  practice ! " 

Her  eyes  triumphed  for  him.  "In  less  !" 

"The  cursed  irony  of  it !  What  do  I  care  for  the 
man  I  shall  be  then  ?  It 's  slaving  one's  life  away  for 
a  stranger !"  He  took  her  hands  abruptly.  "You'll 
go  to  Cannes,  I  suppose,  or  Monte  Carlo  ?  I  heard 
Hollingsworth  say  to-day  that  he  meant  to  take  his 
yacht  over  to  the  Mediterranean — " 

She  released  herself.  "If  you  think  that—" 

"I  don't.  I  almost  wish  I  did.  It  would  be  easier, 
I  mean."  He  broke  off  incoherently.  "I  believe  your 
Aunt  Virginia  does,  though.  She  somehow  connotes 
Hollingsworth  and  the  Mediterranean."  He  caught 
her  hands  again.  "  Alexa — if  we  could  manage  a  lit 
tle  hole  somewhere  out  of  town  ?  " 

"Could  we  ?  "  she  sighed,  half  yielding. 

"In  one  of  those  places  where  they  make  jokes 
[33] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

about  the  mosquitoes,"  he  pressed  her.  "Could  you 
get  on  with  one  servant  ?  " 

"Could  you  get  on  without  varnished  boots  ?" 

"Promise  me  you  won't  go,  then  ! " 

"What  are  you  thinking  of,  Stephen  ?  " 

"I  don't  know,"  he  stammered,  the  question  giving 
unexpected  form  to  his  intention.  "It 's  all  in  the  air 
yet,  of  course ;  but  I  picked  up  a  tip  the  other  day — " 

"  You  're  not  speculating  ?"  she  cried,  with  a  kind 
of  superstitious  terror. 

"Lord,  no.  This  is  a  sure  thing — I  almost  wish  it 
was  n't ;  I  mean  if  I  can  work  it — "  He  had  a  sudden 
vision  of  the  comprehensiveness  of  the  temptation. 
If  only  he  had  been  less  sure  of  Dinslow  !  His  assur 
ance  gave  the  situation  the  base  element  of  safety. 

"I  don't  understand  you,"  she  faltered. 

"Trust  me,  instead !"  he  adjured  her  with  sudden 
energy ;  and  turning  on  her  abruptly,  "If  you  go, 
you  know,  you  go  free,"  he  concluded. 

She  drew  back,  paling  a  little.  "Why  do  you 
make  it  harder  for  me  ?" 

"To  make  it  easier  for  myself,"  he  retorted, 
[34] 


IV 

THE  next  afternoon  Glennard,  leaving  his  office 
earlier  than  usual,  turned,  on  his  way  home, 
into  one  of  the  public  libraries. 

He  had  the  place  to  himself  at  that  closing  hour, 
and  the  librarian  was  able  to  give  an  undivided  at 
tention  to  his  tentative  request  for  letters — collec 
tions  of  letters.  The  librarian  suggested  Walpole. 

"  I  meant  women — women's  letters." 

The  librarian  proffered  Hannah  More  and  Miss 
Martineau. 

Glennard  cursed  his  own  inarticulateness.  "  I  mean 
letters  to — to  some  one  person — a  man ;  their  hus 
band—or — " 

"Ah,"  said  the  inspired  librarian,  "Eloise  and 
Abailard." 

"Well — something  a  little  nearer,  perhaps,"  said 
Glennard,  with  lightness.  "  Did  n't  Merimee — " 

"The  lady's  letters,  in  that  case,  were  not  pub 
lished." 

"Of  course   not,"   said  Glennard,   vexed  at  hi 
blunder. 

[35] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"There  are  George  Sand's  letters  to  Flaubert." 

("Ah!"    Glennard    hesitated.    "Was    she — were 
they — ?"  He  chafed  at  his  own  ignorance  of  the 
v    sentimental  by-paths  of  literature. 

"If  you  want  love-letters,  perhaps  some  of  the 
French  eighteenth-century  correspondences  might  suit 
you  better — Mile.  A'isse  or  Madame  de  Sabran — " 

But  Glennard  insisted.  "I  want  something  mod 
ern — English  or  American.  I  want  to  look  some 
thing  up,""  he  lamely  concluded. 
v"'The  librarian  could  only  suggest  George  Eliot. 
*    "  Well,  give  me  some  of  the  French  things,  then 
— and  I  '11  have  Merimee's  letters.  It  was  the  woman 
who  published  them,  was  n't  it  ?  " 

He  caught  up  his  armful,  transferring  it,  on  the 
doorstep,  to  a  cab  which  carried  him  to  his  rooms. 
He  dined  alone,  hurriedly,  at  a  small  restaurant  near 
by,  and  returned  at  once  to  his  books. 

Late  that  night,  as  he  undressed,  he  wondered 
what  contemptible  impulse  had  forced  from  him  his 
last  words  to  Alexa  Trent.  It  was  bad  enough  to  in 
terfere  with  the  girl's  chances  by  hanging  about  her 
[36] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

to  the  obvious  exclusion  of  other  men,  but  it  was 
worse  to  seem  to  justify  his  weakness  by  dressing  up 
the  future  in  delusive  ambiguities.  He  saw  himself 
sinking  from  depth  to  depth  of  sentimental  coward 
ice  in  his  reluctance  to  renounce  his  hold  on  her; 
and  it  filled  him  with  self-disgust  to  think  that  the 
highest  feeling  of  which  he  supposed  himself  capable 
was  blent  with  such  base  elements. 

His  awakening  was  hardly  cheered  by  the  sight  of 
her  writing.  He  tore  her  note  open  and  took  in  the  few 
lines — she  seldom  exceeded  the  first  page — with  the 
lucidity  of  apprehension  that  is  the  forerunner  of  evil. 

"  My  aunt  sails  on  Saturday  and  I  must  give  her 
my  answer  the  day  after  to-morrow.  Please  don't 
come  till  then — I  want  to  think  the  question  over 
by  myself.  I  know  I  ought  to  go.  Won't  you  help 
me  to  be  reasonable  ?  " 

It  was  settled,  then.  Well,  he  would  help  her  to  be 
reasonable;  he  would  n't  stand  in  her  way ;  he  would 
let  her  go.  For  two  years  he  had  been  living  some 
other,  luckier  man's  life ;  the  time  had  come  when  he 
must  drop  back  into  his  own.  He  no  longer  tried  to 
[37] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

look  ahead,  to  grope  his  way  through  the  endless 
labyrinth  of  his  material  difficulties ;  a  sense  of  dull 
resignation  closed  in  on  him  like  a  fog. 

"Hullo,  Glennard  ! "  a  voice  said,  as  an  electric  car, 
late  that  afternoon,  dropped  him  at  an  uptown  corner. 

He  looked  up  and  met  the  interrogative  smile  of 
Barton  Flamel,  who  stood  on  the  curbstone  watch 
ing  the  retreating  car  with  the  eye  of  a  man  philo 
sophic  enough  to  remember  that  it  will  be  followed 
by  another. 

Glennard  felt  his  usual  impulse  of  pleasure  at  meet 
ing  Flamel ;  but  it  was  not  in  this  case  curtailed  by 
the  reaction  of  contempt  that  habitually  succeeded 
it.  Probably  even  the  few  men  who  had  known  Flamel 
since  his  youth  could  have  given  no  good  reason  for 
the  vague  mistrust  that  he  inspired.  Some  people  are 
judged  by  their  actions,  others  by  their  ideas  ;  and 
perhaps  the  shortest  way  of  defining  Flamel  is  to 
say  that  his  well-known  leniency  of  view  was  vaguely 
divined  to  include  himself.  Simple  minds  may  have 
resented  the  discovery  that  his  opinions  were  based 
[38] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

on  his  perceptions ;  but  there  was  certainly  no  more 
definite  charge  against  him  than  that  implied  in  the 
doubt  as  to  how  he  would  behave  in  an  emergency, 
and  his  company  was  looked  upon  as  one  of  those 
mildly  unwholesome  dissipations  to  which  the  pru 
dent  may  occasionally  yield.  It  now  offered  itself  to 
Glennard  as  an  easy  escape  from  the  obsession  of 
moral  problems,  which  somehow  could  no  more  be 
worn  in  FlamePs  presence  than  a  surplice  in  the 
street. 

"Where  are  you  going  ?  To  the  club  ? "  Flamel 
asked ;  adding,  as  the  younger  man  assented,  "Why 
not  come  to  my  studio  instead  ?  You  11  see  one  bore 
instead  of  twenty."" 

The  apartment  which  Flamel  described  as  his  stu 
dio  showed,  as  its  one  claim  to  the  designation,  a 
perennially  empty  easel,  the  rest  of  its  space  being 
filled  with  the  evidences  of  a  comprehensive  dilet- 
tanteism.  Against  this  background,  which  seemed 
the  visible  expression  of  its  owner's  intellectual  toler 
ance,  rows  of  fine  books  detached  themselves  with  a 
prominence  showing  them  to  be  FlamePs  chief  care. 
[39] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

Glennard  glanced  with  the  eye  of  untrained  curi 
osity  at  the  lines  of  warm-toned  morocco,  while  his 
host  busied  himself  with  the  uncorking  of  Apolli- 
naris. 

"You  Ve  got  a  splendid  lot  of  books,"  he  said. 

"They're  fairly  decent,"  the  other  assented,  in 
the  curt  tone  of  the  collector  who  will  not  talk  of 
his  passion  for  fear  of  talking  of  nothing  else;  then, 
as  Glennard,  his  hands  in  his  pockets,  began  to  stroll 
perfunctorily  down  the  long  line  of  bookcases — 
"Some  men,"  Flamel  irresistibly  added,  "think  of 
books  merely  as  tools,  others  as  tooling.  I  'm  between 
the  two ;  there  are  days  when  I  use  them  as  scenery, 
other  days  when  I  want  them  as  society ;  so  that,  as 
you  see,  my  library  represents  a  makeshift  compro 
mise  between  looks  and  brains,  and  the  collectors 
look  down  on  me  almost  as  much  as  the  students." 

Glennard,  without  answering,  was  mechanically 
taking  one  book  after  another  from  the  shelves.  His 
hands  slipped  curiously  over  the  smooth  covers  and 
the  noiseless  subsidence  of  opening  pages.  Suddenly 
he  came  on  a  thin  volume  of  faded  manuscript. 
[40] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"  What 's  this  ?  "  he  asked  with  a  listless  sense  of 
wonder. 

"Ah,  you  Ye  at  my  manuscript  shelf.  IVe  been 
going  in  for  that  sort  of  thing  lately."  Flamel  came 
up  and  looked  over  his  shoulders.  "That's  a  bit  of 
Stendhal — one  of  the  Italian  stories — and  here  are 
some  letters  of  Balzac  to  Madame  Surville." 

Glennard  took  the  book  with  sudden  eagerness. 
"  Who  was  Madame  Surville  ?  " 

"His  sister."  He  was  conscious  that  Flamel  was 
looking  at  him  with  the  smile  that  was  like  an  in 
terrogation  point.  "  I  did  n't  know  you  cared  for  this 
kind  of  thing." 

"  I  don't — at  least  I  Ve  never  had  the  chance.  Have 
you  many  collections  of  letters  ?  " 

"Lord,  no — very  few.  I'm  just  beginning,  and 
most  of  the  interesting  ones  are  out  of  my  reach. 
Here's  a  queer  little  collection,  though — the  rarest 
thing  I  Ve  got — half  a  dozen  of  Shelley's  letters  to 
Harriet  Westbrook.  I  had  a  devil  of  a  time  getting 
them — a  lot  of  collectors  were  after  them." 

Glennard,  taking  the  volume  from  his  hand, 
[41] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

glanced  with  a  kind  of  repugnance  at  the  interleav 
ing  of  yellow  crisscrossed  sheets.  "  She  was  the  one 
who  drowned  herself,  was  n't  she  ?  " 

Flamel  nodded.  "  I  suppose  that  little  episode  adds 
about  fifty  per  cent,  to  their  value,"  he  said  medi 
tatively. 

Glennard  laid  the  book  down.  He  wondered  why 
he  had  joined  Flamel.  He  was  in  no  humor  to  be 
amused  by  the  older  man's  talk,  and  a  recrudescence 
of  personal  misery  rose  about  him  like  an  icy  tide. 

"I  believe  I  must  take  myself  off,"  he  said.  "I'd 
forgotten  an  engagement." 

He  turned  to  go ;  but  almost  at  the  same  moment 
he  was  conscious  of  a  duality  of  intention  wherein 
his  apparent  wish  to  leave  revealed  itself  as  a  last 
effort  of  the  will  against  the  overmastering  desire  to 
stay  and  unbosom  himself  to  Flamel. 

The  older  man,  as  though  divining  the  conflict, 
laid  a  detaining  pressure  on  his  arm. 

"  Won't  the  engagement  keep  ?  Sit  down  and  try 
one  of  these  cigars.  I  don't  often  have  the  luck  of 
seeing  you  here." 

[42] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"I'm  rather  driven  just  now,11  said  Glennard 
vaguely.  He  found  himself  seated  again,  and  Flamel 
had  pushed  to  his  side  a  low  stand  holding  a  bottle 
of  Apollinaris  and  a  decanter  of  cognac. 

Flamel,  thrown  back  in  his  capacious  arm-chair, 
surveyed  him  through  a  cloud  of  smoke  with  the 
comfortable  tolerance  of  the  man  to  whom  no  incon 
sistencies  need  be  explained.  Connivance  was  implicit 
in  the  air.  It  was  the  kind  of  atmosphere  in  which 
the  outrageous  loses  its  edge.  Glennard  felt  a  gradual 
relaxing  of  his  nerves. 

"I  suppose  one  has  to  pay  a  lot  for  letters  like 
that  ?  "  he  heard  himself  asking,  with  a  glance  in  the 
direction  of  the  volume  he  had  laid  aside. 

"Oh,  so-so — depends  on  circumstances."  Flamel 
viewed  him  thoughtfully.  "  Are  you  thinking  of  col 
lecting?" 

Glennard  laughed.  "Lord,  no.  The  other  way 
round." 

"Selling?" 

"Oh,  I  hardly  know.  I  was  thinking  of  a  poor 
chap — " 

[43] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

Flamel  filled  the  pause  with  a  nod  of  interest. 

"A  poor  chap  I  used  to  know — who  died — he 
died  last  year — and  who  left  me  a  lot  of  letters, 
letters  he  thought  a  great  deal  of — he  was  fond  of 
me  and  left  'em  to  me  outright,  with  the  idea,  I  sup 
pose,  that  they  might  benefit  me  somehow — I  don't 
know — I'm  not  much  up  on  such  things — "  He 
reached  his  hand  to  the  tall  glass  his  host  had  filled. 

"A  collection  of  autograph  letters,  eh?  Any  big 
names  ?  " 

"  Oh,  only  one  name.  They  Ve  all  letters  written 
to  him — by  one  person,  you  understand ;  a  woman, 
in  fact—" 

"  Oh,  a  woman,"  said  Flamel  negligently. 

Glennard  was  nettled  by  his  obvious  loss  of  inter 
est.  "I  rather  think  they'd  attract  a  good  deal  of 
notice  if  they  were  published." 

Flamel  still  looked  uninterested.  "Love-letters,  I 
suppose  ?  " 

"  Oh,  just — the  letters  a  woman  would  write  to  a 
man  she  knew  well.  They  were  tremendous  friends, 
he  and  she." 

[44] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"  And  she  wrote  a  clever  letter  ?  " 

"  Clever  ?  It  was  Margaret  Aubyn." 

A  great  silence  filled  the  room.  It  seemed  to  Glen- 
nard  that  the  words  had  burst  from  him  as  blood 
gushes  from  a  wound. 

"Great  Scott!"  said  Flamel  sitting  up.  "A  col 
lection  of  Margaret  Aubyn's  letters?  Did  you  say 
you  had  them  ?  " 

"  They  were  left  me — by  my  friend." 

"  I  see.  Was  he — well,  no  matter.  You  're  to  be 
congratulated,  at  any  rate.  What  are  you  going  to 
do  with  them  ?  " 

Glennard  stood  up  with  a  sense  of  weariness  in  all 
his  bones.  "Oh,  I  don't  know.  I  haven't  thought 
much  about  it.  I  just  happened  to  see  that  some 
fellow  was  writing  her  life — " 

"  Joslin  ;  yes.  You  did  n't  think  of  giving  them  to 
him?" 

Glennard  had  lounged  across  the  room  and  stood 
staring  up  at  a  bronze  Bacchus  who  drooped  his  gar 
landed  head  above  the  pediment  of  an  Italian  cabi 
net.  "What  ought  I  to  do?  You're  just  the  fellow 
[45] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

to  advise  me."  He  felt  the  blood  in  his  cheek  as  he 
spoke. 

Flamel  sat  with  meditative  eye.  "What  do  you 
want  to  do  with  them  ?  "  he  asked. 

"I  want  to  publish  them,"  said  Glennard,  swing 
ing  round  with  sudden  energy — "If  I  can — " 

"  If  you  can  ?  They  're  yours,  you  say  ?  " 

"They're  mine  fast  enough.  There's  no  one  to 
prevent — I  mean  there  are  no  restrictions — "  he  was 
arrested  by  the  sense  that  these  accumulated  proofs 
of  impunity  might  precisely  stand  as  the  strongest 
check  on  his  action. 

"  And  Mrs.  Aubyn  had  no  family,  I  believe  ?  " 

"No." 

"  Then  I  don't  see  who 's  to  interfere,"  said  Flamel, 
studying  his  cigar-tip. 

Glennard  had  turned  his  unseeing  stare  on  an 
ecstatic  Saint  Catherine  framed  in  tarnished  gilding. 

"  It 's  just  this  way,"  he  began  again,  with  an  ef 
fort.  "When  letters  are  as  personal  as — as  these  of 
my  friend's.  .  .  .  Well,  I  don't  mind  telling  you 
that  the  cash  would  make  a  heap  of  difference  to 
[46] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

me ;  such  a  lot  that  it  rather  obscures  my  judgment 
— the  fact  is,  if  I  could  lay  my  hand  on  a  few  thou 
sands  now  I  could  get  into  a  big  thing,  and  with 
out  appreciable  risk  ;  and  I  'd  like  to  know  whether 
you  think  I'd  be  justified  —  under  the  circum 
stances.  .  .  ."  He  paused  with  a  dry  throat.  It 
seemed  to  him  at  the  moment  that  it  would  be  im 
possible  for  him  ever  to  sink  lower  in  his  own  esti 
mation.  He  was  in  truth  less  ashamed  of  weighing 
the  temptation  than  of  submitting  his  scruples  to  a 
man  like  Flamel,  and  affecting  to  appeal  to  senti 
ments  of  delicacy  on  the  absence  of  which  he  had 
consciously  reckoned.  But  he  had  reached  a  point 
where  each  word  seemed  to  compel  another,  as  each 
wave  in  a  stream  is  forced  forward  by  the  pressure 
behind  it;  and  before  Flamel  could  speak  he  had 
faltered  out — "You  don't  think  people  could  say 
.  .  .  could  criticise  the  man.  .  .  ." 

"  But  the  man  's  dead,  is  n't  he  ?  " 

"  He 's  dead — yes ;  but  can  I  assume  the  responsi 
bility  without — " 

Flamel  hesitated;  and  almost  immediately  Glen- 
[47] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

nard's  scruples  gave  way  to  irritation.  If  at  this  hour 
Flamel  were  to  affect  an  inopportune  reluctance — ! 

The  older  man's  answer  reassured  him.  "Why 
need  you  assume  any  responsibility?  Your  name 
won't  appear,  of  course ;  and  as  to  your  friend's,  I 
don't  see  why  his  should  either.  He  was  n't  a  celeb 
rity  himself,  I  suppose  ?  " 

"No,  no." 

"  Then  the  letters  can  be  addressed  to  Mr.  Blank. 
Does  n't  that  make  it  all  right  ?  " 

Glennard's  hesitation  revived.  "For  the  public, 
yes.  But  I  don't  see  that  it  alters  the  case  for  me. 
The  question  is,  ought  I  to  publish  them  at  all  ?  " 

"  Of  course  you  ought  to."  Flamel  spoke  with  in 
vigorating  emphasis.  "I  doubt  if  you'd  be  justified 
in  keeping  them  back.  Anything  of  Margaret  Au- 
byn's  is  more  or  less  public  property  by  this  time. 
She 's  too  great  for  any  one  of  us.  I  was  only  won 
dering  how  you  could  use  them  to  the  best  advan 
tage — to  yourself,  I  mean.  How  many  are  there  ?  " 

"Oh,    a    lot;    perhaps    a    hundred — I   haven't 
counted.  There  may  be  more.  .  .  ." 
[48] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"  Gad  !  What  a  haul !  When  were  they  written  ?  " 

"I  don't  know — that  is — they  corresponded  for 
years.  What's  the  odds?"  He  moved  toward  his 
hat  with  a  vague  impulse  of  flight. 

"It  all  counts,"  said  Flamel  imperturbably.  "A 
long  correspondence — one,  I  mean,  that  covers  a 
great  deal  of  time — is  obviously  worth  more  than  if 
the  same  number  of  letters  had  been  written  within 
a  year.  At  any  rate,  you  won't  give  them  to  Joslin  ? 
They  'd  fill  a  book,  would  n't  they  ?  " 

"  I  suppose  so.  I  don't  know  how  much  it  takes  to 
fill  a  book." 

"  Not  love-letters,  you  say  ?  " 

"Why  ?"  flashed  from  Glennard. 

"  Oh,  nothing — only  the  big  public  is  sentimental, 
and  if  they  were — why,  you  could  get  any  money 
for  Margaret  Aubyn's  love-letters." 

Glennard  was  silent. 

"Are  the  letters  interesting  in  themselves?  I 
mean  apart  from  the  association  with  her  name  ?  " 

"I'm  no  judge."  Glennard  took  up  his  hat  and 
thrust  himself  into  his  overcoat.  "I  dare  say  I 
[49] 


TH-E    TOUCHSTONE 

shaVt  do  anything  about  it.  And,  Flamel  —  you 
won't  mention  this  to  any  one  ?  " 

"  Lord,  no.  Well,  I  congratulate  you.  You  Ve  got 
a  big  thing."  Flamel  was  smiling  at  him  from  the 
hearth. 

Glennard,  on  the  threshold,  forced  a  response  to 
the  smile,  while  he  questioned  with  loitering  indif 
ference — "  Financially,  eh  ?  * 

"  Rather ;  I  should  say  so." 

Glennard's  hand  lingered  on  the  knob.  "How 
much  —  should  you  say?  You  know  about  such 
things." 

"  Oh,  I  should  have  to  see  the  letters ;  but  I  should 
say — well,  if  you've  got  enough  to  fill  a  book  and 
they  're  fairly  readable,  and  the  book  is  brought  out 
at  the  right  time — say  ten  thousand  down  from  the 
publisher,  and  possibly  one  or  two  more  in  royalties. 
If  you  got  the  publishers  bidding  against  each  other 
you  might  do  even  better ;  but  of  course  I  'm  talking 
in  the  dark." 

"  Of  course,"  said  Glennard,  with  sudden  dizziness. 
His  hand  had  slipped  from  the  knob  and  he  stood 
[50] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

staring  down  at  the  exotic  spirals  of  the  Persian  rug 
beneath  his  feet. 

"  I  'd  have  to  see  the  letters,1'  Flamel  repeated. 

"  Of  course — you  M  have  to  see  them.  .  .  ."  Glen- 
nard  stammered  ;  and,  without  turning,  he  flung  over 
his  shoulder  an  inarticulate  "  Good-bye.  .  .  ." 


[51] 


THE  little  house,  as  Glennard  strolled  up  to  it 
between  the  trees,  seemed  no  more  than  a  gay 
tent  pitched  against  the  sunshine.  It  had  the  crisp- 
ness  of  a  freshly  starched  summer  gown,  and  the 
geraniums  on  the  veranda  bloomed  as  simultaneously 
as  the  flowers  in  a  bonnet.  The  garden  was  prosper 
ing  absurdly.  Seed  they  had  sown  at  random — amid 
laughing  counter-charges  of  incompetence — had  shot 
up  in  fragrant  defiance  of  their  blunders.  He  smiled 
to  see  the  clematis  unfolding  its  punctual  wings 
about  the  porch.  The  tiny  lawn  was  smooth  as  a 
shaven  cheek,  and  a  crimson  rambler  mounted  to 
the  nursery  window  of  a  baby  who  never  cried.  A 
breeze  shook  the  awning  above  the  tea-table,  and  his 
wife,  as  he  drew  near,  could  be  seen  bending  above  a 
kettle  that  was  just  about  to  boil.  So  vividly  did  the 
whole  scene  suggest  the  painted  bliss  of  a  stage  set 
ting,  that  it  would  have  been  hardly  surprising  to 
see  her  step  forward  among  the  flowers  and  trill  out 
her  virtuous  happiness  from  the  veranda  rail. 

The  stale  heat  of  the  long  day  in  town,  the  dusty 
[52] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

promiscuity  of  the  suburban  train,  were  now  but  the 
requisite  foil  to  an  evening  of  scented  breezes  and 
tranquil  talk.  They  had  been  married  more  than  a 
year,  and  each  home-coming  still  reflected  the  fresh 
ness  of  their  first  day  together.  If,  indeed,  their  hap-x 
piness  had  a  flaw,  it  was  in  resembling  too  closely  j 
the  bright  impermanence  of  their  surroundings.  Their 
love  as  yet  was  but  the  gay  tent  of  holiday-makers. 

His  wife  looked  up  with  a  smile.  The  country  life 
suited  her,  and  her  beauty  had  gained  depth  from 
a  stillness  in  which  certain  faces  might  have  grown 
opaque. 

"  Are  you  very  tired  ?  "  she  asked,  pouring  his  tea. 

"Just  enough  to  enjoy  this."  He  rose  from  the 
chair  in  which  he  had  thrown  himself  and  bent  over 
the  tray  for  his  cream.  "  You  Ve  had  a  visitor  ?  "  he 
commented,  noticing  a  half-empty  cup  beside  her 
own. 

"  Only  Mr.  Flamel,"  she  said  indifferently. 

"Flamel?  Again?" 

She  answered  without  show  of  surprise.  "  He  left 
just  now.  His  yacht  is  down  at  Laurel  Bay  and 
[53] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

he  borrowed  a  trap  of  the  Dreshams  to  drive  over 
here." 

Glennard  made  no  comment,  and  she  went  on, 
leaning  her  head  back  against  the  cushions  of  her 
bamboo  seat,  "  He  wants  us  to  go  for  a  sail  with 
him  next  Sunday." 

Glennard  meditatively  stirred  his  tea.  He  was  try 
ing  to  think  of  the  most  natural  and  unartificial 
thing  to  say,  and  his  voice  seemed  to  come  from  the 
outside,  as  though  he  were  speaking  behind  a  mario 
nette.  "  Do  you  want  to  ?  " 

"Just  as  you  please,"  she  said  compliantly.  No 
affectation  of  indifference  could  have  been  as  baffling 
as  her  compliance.  Glennard,  of  late,  was  beginning 
to  feel  that  the  surface  which,  a  year  ago,  he  had 
taken  for  a  sheet  of  clear  glass,  might,  after  all,  be  a 
]  mirror  reflecting  merely  his  own  conception  of  what 
lay  behind  it. 

"Do  you  like  Flamel?"  he  suddenly  asked;  to 
which,  still  engaged  with  her  tea,  she  returned  the 
feminine  answer — "  I  thought  you  did." 

"  I  do,  of  course,"  he  agreed,  vexed  at  his  own  in- 
[54] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

corrigible  tendency  to  magnify  FlamePs  importance 
by  hovering  about  the  topic.  "  A  sail  would  be  rather 
jolly;  let's  go." 

She  made  no  reply  and  he  drew  forth  the  rolled- 
up  evening  papers  which  he  had  thrust  into  his 
pocket  on  leaving  the  train.  As  he  smoothed  them 
out  his  own  countenance  seemed  to  undergo  the 
same  process.  He  ran  his  eye  down  the  list  of  stocks, 
and  FlamePs  importunate  personality  receded  behind 
the  rows  of  figures  pushing  forward  into  notice  like 
so  many  bearers  of  good  news.  Glennard's  invest 
ments  were  flowering  like  his  garden:  the  dryest  \ 
shares  blossomed  into  dividends  and  a  golden  har 
vest  awaited  his  sickle. 

He  glanced  at  his  wife  with  the  tranquil  air  of 
a  man  who  digests  good  luck  as  naturally  as  the  dry 
ground  absorbs  a  shower.  "Things  are  looking  un 
commonly  well.  I  believe  we  shall  be  able  to  go  to 
town  for  two  or  three  months  next  winter  if  we  can 
find  something  cheap." 

She  smiled  luxuriously :  it  was  pleasant  to  be  able 
to  say,  with  an  air  of  balancing  relative  advantages, 
[55] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"Really,  on  the  baby's  account  I  shall  be  almost 
sorry ;  but  if  we  do  go,  there 's  Kate  Erskine's  house 
.  .  .  she  '11  let  us  have  it  for  almost  nothing.  .  .  ." 

"  Well,  write  her  about  it,"  he  recommended,  his 
eye  travelling  on  in  search  of  the  weather  report.  He 
had  turned  to  the  wrong  page ;  and  suddenly  a  line  of 
black  characters  leapt  out  at  him  as  from  an  ambush. 

"MARGARET  AUBYN'S  LETTERS. 

"  Two  volumes.  Out  To-day.  First  Edition  of  five  thousand 
"  sold  out  before  leaving  the  press.  Second  Edition  ready  next 
"  week.  The  Book  of  the  Year.  .  .  ." 

He  looked  up  stupidly.  His  wife  still  sat  with  her 
head  thrown  back,  her  pure  profile  detached  against 
the  cushions.  She  was  smiling  a  little  over  the  pros 
pect  his  last  words  had  opened.  Behind  her  head 
shivers  of  sun  and  shade  ran  across  the  striped  awn 
ing.  A  row  of  maples  and  a  privet  hedge  hid  their 
neighbor's  gables,  giving  them  undivided  possession 
of  their  leafy  half-acre ;  and  life,  a  moment  before, 
had  been  like  their  plot  of  ground,  shut  off,  hedged 
in  from  importunities,  impenetrably  his  and  hers. 
Now  it  seemed  to  him  that  every  maple-leaf,  every 
[56] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

'^privet-bud,  was  a  relentless   human  gaze,  pressing 
close  upon  their  privacy.  It  was  as  though  they  sat  in 
a  brightly  lit  room,  uncurtained  from  a  darkness  full 
of  hostile  watchers.  .  .  .  His  wife  still  smiled ;  and 
her  unconsciousness  of  danger  seemed  in  some  hor 
rible  way  to  put  her  beyond  the  reach  of  rescue.  .  .  . 
He  had  not  known  that  it  would  be  like  this. 
After  the  first  odious  weeks,  spent  in  preparing  the 
letters  for  publication,  in  submitting  them  to  Flamel, 
and  in  negotiating  with  the  publishers,  the  transac 
tion  had  dropped  out  of  his  consciousness  into  that 
unvisited  limbo  to  which  we  relegate  the  deeds  we 
would  rather  not  have  done  but  have  no  notion  of 
undoing.  From  the  moment  he  had  obtained  Miss 
Trent's  promise  not  to  sail  with  her  aunt  he  had 
tried    to   imagine   himself    irrevocably    committed. 
After  that,  he  argued,  his  first  duty  was  to  her — 
she  had  become  his  conscience.  The  sum  obtained 
from  the  publishers  by  FlameFs  adroit  manipulations, 
and  opportunely  transferred  to  Dinslow's  successful 
venture,  already  yielded  a  return  which,  combined 
with  Glennard's  professional  earnings,  took  the  edge 
[57] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

of  compulsion  from  their  way  of  living,  making  it 
appear  the  expression  of  a  graceful  preference  for 
simplicity.  It  was  the  mitigated  poverty  which  can 
subscribe  to  a  review  or  two  and  have  a  few  flowers 
on  the  dinner-table.  And  already  in  a  small  way 
Glennard  was  beginning  to  feel  the  magnetic  quality 
of  prosperity.  Clients  who  had  passed  his  door  in  the 
hungry  days  sought  it  out  now  that  it  bore  the  name 
of  a  successful  man.  It  was  understood  that  a  small 
inheritance,  cleverly  invested,  was  the  source  of  his 
fortune ;  and  there  was  a  feeling  that  a  man  who 
could  do  so  well  for  himself  was  likely  to  know  how 
to  turn  over  other  people's  money. 

But  it  was  in  the  more  intimate  reward  of  his 
wife's  happiness  that  Glennard  tasted  the  full  flavor 
of  success.  Coming  out  of  conditions  so  narrow  that 
those  he  offered  her  seemed  spacious,  she  fitted  into 
her  new  life  without  any  of  those  manifest  efforts  at 
adjustment  that  are  as  sore  to  a  husband's  pride  as 
the  critical  rearrangement  of  the  bridal  furniture.  She 
had  given  him,  instead,  the  delicate  pleasure  of  watch 
ing  her  expand  like  a  sea-creature  restored  to  its 
[58] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

element,  stretching  out  the  atrophied  tentacles  of  girl 
ish  vanity  and  enjoyment  to  the  rising  tide  of  op 
portunity.  And  somehow — in  the  windowless  inner  \%v~ 
cell  of  his  consciousness  where  self-criticism  cowered 
— Glennard's  course  seemed  justified  by  its  merely 
material  success.  How  could  such  a  crop  of  inno 
cent  blessedness  have  sprung  from  tainted  soil  ?  .  .  . 
Now  he  had  the  injured  sense  of  a  man  entrapped 
into  a  disadvantageous  bargain.  He  had  not  known 
it  would  be  like  this ;  and  a  dull  anger  gathered  at 
his  heart.  Anger  against  whom?  Against  his  wife, 
for  not  knowing  what  he  suffered  ?  Against  Flamel, 
for  being  the  unconscious  instrument  of  his  wrong 
doing?  Or  against  that  mute  memory  to  which  his 
own  act  had  suddenly  given  a  voice  of  accusation  ? 
Yes,  that  was  it;  and  his  punishment  henceforth 
would  be  the  presence,  the  unescapable  presence,  of  | 
the  woman  he  had  so  persistently  evaded.  She  would 
always  be  there  now.  It  was  as  though  he  had  mar 
ried  her  instead  of  the  other.  It  was  what  she  had 
always  wanted — to  be  with  him — and  she  had 
gained  her  point  at  last.  .  .  . 
[59] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

He  sprang  up,  as  though  in  an  impulse  of  flight. 
.  .  .  The  sudden  movement  lifted  his  wife's  lids, 
and  she  asked,  in  the  incurious  voice  of  the  woman 
whose  life  is  enclosed  in  a  magic  circle  of  prosperity 
— "  Any  news  ?  " 

"  No — none — "  he  said,  roused  to  a  sense  of  im 
mediate  peril.  The  papers  lay  scattered  at  his  feet — 
what  if  she  were  to  see  them  ?  He  stretched  his  arm  to 
gather  them  up,  but  his  next  thought  showed  him  the 
futility  of  such  concealment.  The  same  advertisement 
would  appear  every  day,  for  weeks  to  come,  in  every 
newspaper ;  how  could  he  prevent  her  seeing  it  ?  He 
could  not  always  be  hiding  the  papers  from  her.  .  .  . 
Well,  and  what  if  she  did  see  it?  It  would  signify 
nothing  to  her;  the  chances  were  that  she  would 
never  even  read  the  book.  ...  As  she  ceased  to  be 
an  element  of  fear  in  his  calculations  the  distance 
between  them  seemed  to  lessen  and  he  took  her 
again,  as  it  were,  into  the  circle  of  his  conjugal  pro 
tection.  .  .  .  Yet  a  moment  before  he  had  almost 
hated  her !  .  .  .  He  laughed  aloud  at  his  senseless 
terrors.  .  .  .  He  was  off  his  balance,  decidedly.  .  .  . 
[60] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"  What  are  you  laughing  at  ?  "  she  asked. 

He  explained,  elaborately,  that  he  was  laughing 
at  the  recollection  of  an  old  woman  in  the  train,  an 
old  woman  with  a  lot  of  bundles,  who  could  n't  find 
her  ticket.  .  .  .  But  somehow,  in  the  telling,  the 
humor  of  the  story  seemed  to  evaporate,  and  he  felt 
the  conventionality  of  her  smile.  He  glanced  at  his 
watch.  "  Is  n't  it  time  to  dress  ?  " 

She  rose  with  serene  reluctance.  "It's  a  pity  to 
go  in.  The  garden  looks  so  lovely." 

They  lingered  side  by  side,  surveying  their  do 
main.  There  was  not  space  in  it,  at  this  hour,  for  the 
shadow  of  the  elm  tree  in  the  angle  of  the  hedge :  it 
crossed  the  lawn,  cut  the  flower-border  in  two,  and 
ran  up  the  side  of  the  house  to  the  nursery  window. 
She  bent  to  flick  a  caterpillar  from  the  honeysuckle; 
then,  as  they  turned  indoors,  "  If  we  mean  to  go  on 
the  yacht  next  Sunday,"  she  suggested,  "  ought  n't 
you  to  let  Mr.  Flamel  know  ?  " 

Glennard's  exasperation  deflected  suddenly.  "Of 
course  I  shall  let  him  know.  You  always  seem  to  im 
ply  that  I  'm  going  to  do  something  rude  to  Flamel." 
[61] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

The  words  reverberated  through  her  silence;  she 
had  a  way  of  thus  leaving  one  space  in  which  to 
contemplate  one's  folly  at  arm's  length.  Glennard 
turned  on  his  heel  and  went  upstairs.  As  he  dropped 
into  a  chair  before  his  dressing-table,  he  said  to  him 
self  that  in  the  last  hour  he  had  sounded  the  depths 
of  his  humiliation,  and  that  the  lowest  dregs  of  it, 
the  very  bottom-slime,  was  the  hateful  necessity  of 
having  always,  as  long  as  the  two  men  lived,  to  be 
civil  to  Barton  Flamel. 


[62] 


VI 

THE  week  in  town  had  been  sultry,  and  the  men, 
in  the  Sunday  emancipation  of  white  flannel 
and  duck,  filled  the  deck  chairs  of  the  yacht  with 
their  outstretched  apathy,  following,  through  a  mist 
of  cigarette  smoke,  the  flitting  inconsequences  of  the 
women.  The  party  was  a  small  one — Flam  el  had  few 
intimate  friends — but  composed  of  more  heteroge 
neous  atoms  than  the  little  pools  into  which  society 
usually  runs.  The  reaction  from  the  chief  episode  of 
his  earlier  life  had  bred  in  Glennard  an  uneasy  dis 
taste  for  any  kind  of  personal  saliency.  Cleverness  was 
useful  in  business ;  but  in  society  it  seemed  to  him  as 
futile  as  the  sham  cascades  formed  by  a  stream  that 
might  have  been  used  to  drive  a  mill.  He  liked  the 
collective  point  of  view  that  goes  with  the  civilized 
uniformity  of  dress  clothes,  and  his  wife's  attitude 
implied  the  same  preference;  yet  they  found  them 
selves  slipping  more  and  more  into  FlamePs  intimacy. 
Alexa  had  once  or  twice  said  that  she  enjoyed  meet 
ing  clever  people;  but  her  enjoyment  took  the  nega 
tive  form  of  a  smiling  receptivity;  and  Glennard  felt 
[63] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

'  a  growing  preference  for  the  kind  of  people  who  have 
i  their  thinking  done  for  them  by  the  community. 

Still,  the  deck  of  the  yacht  was  a  pleasant  refuge 
from  the  heat  on  shore,  and  his  wife's  profile,  serenely 
projected  against  the  changing  blue,  lay  on  his  ret 
ina  like  a  cool  hand  on  the  nerves.  He  had  never 
been  more  impressed  *by  the  Jdnd  of  Absoluteness  that 

lifted  her  beauty  above  the  transient  effects  of  other 

.*    i   f  I  *   *  ' 

women,  making  the  most  harmdnious  face  seem  an 

accidental  collocation  of  features. 

The  ladies  who  directly  suggested  this  comparison 
were  of  a  kind  accustomed  to  take  similar  risks  with 
more  gratifying  results.  Mrs.  Armiger  had  in  fact 
long  been  the  triumphant  alternative  of  those  who 
couldn't  "see"  Alexa  Glennard's  looks;  and  Mrs. 
s  claims  to  consideration  were  founded  on 


that  distribution  of  effects  which  is  the  wonder  of 
those  who  admire  a  highly  cultivated  country.  The 
third  lady  of  the  trio  which  Glennard's  fancy  had 
put  to  such  unflattering  uses  was  bound  by  circum 
stances  to  support  the  claims  of  the  other  two.  This 
was  Mrs.  Dresham,  the  wife  of  the  editor  of  the 
[64] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

Radiator.  Mrs.  Dresham  was  a  lady  who  had  rescued 
herself  from  social  obscurity  by  assuming  the  role 
of  her  husband's  exponent  and  interpreter;  and 
Dresham's  leisure  being  devoted  to  the  cultivation 
of  remarkable  women,  his  wife's  attitude  committed 
her  to  the  public  celebration  of  their  remarkable- 
ness.  For  the  conceivable  tedium  of  this  duty,  Mrs. 
Dresham  was  repaid  by  the  fact  that  there  were  peo 
ple  who  took  her  for  a  remarkable  woman ;  and  who 
in  turn  probably  purchased  similar  distinction  with 
the  small  change  of  her  reflected  importance.  As  to 
the  other  ladies  of  the  party,  they  were  simply  the 
wives  of  some  of  the  men — the  kind  of  women  who 
expect  to  be  talked  to  collectively  and  to  have  their 
questions  left  unanswered. 

Mrs.  Armiger,  the  latest  embodiment  of  Dresham's 
instinct  for  the  remarkable,  was  an  innocent  beauty 
who  for  years  had  distilled  dulness  among  a  set  of 
people  now  self-condemned  by  their  inability  to  ap 
preciate  her.  Under  Dresham's  tutelage  she  had 
developed  into  a  "  thoughtful  woman,"  who  read  his 
leaders  in  the  Radiator  and  bought  the  works  he 
[65] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

recommended.  When  a  new  book  appeared,  people 
wanted  to  know  what  Mrs.  Armiger  thought  of  it ; 
and  a  young  gentleman  who  had  made  a  trip  in 
Touraine  had  recently  inscribed  to  her  the  wide- 
margined  result  of  his  explorations. 

Glennard,  leaning  back  with  his  head  against  the 
rail  and  a  slit  of  fugitive  blue  between  his  half-closed 
lids,  vaguely  wished  she  would  n't  spoil  the  afternoon 
by  making  people  talk ;  though  he  reduced  his  an 
noyance  to  the  minimum  by  not  listening  to  what 
was  said,  there  remained  a  latent  irritation  against 
the  general  futility  of  words. 

His  wife's  gift  of  silence  seemed  to  him  the  most 
vivid  commentary  on  the  clumsiness  of  speech  as  a 
means  of  intercourse,  and  his  eyes  had  turned  to  her 
in  renewed  appreciation  of  this  finer  faculty  when 
Mrs.  Arranger's  voice  abruptly  brought  home  to  him 
the  underrated  potentialities  of  language. 

"  You  Ve  read  them,  of  course,  Mrs.  Glennard  ?  " 
he  heard  her  ask;  and,  in  reply  to  Alexa's  vague 
interrogation — "Why,  the  Aubyn  Letters — it's  the 
only  book  people  are  talking  of  this  week." 
[66] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

Mrs.  Dresham  immediately  saw  her  advantage. 
"  You  have  n't  read  them  ?  How  very  extraordinary  ! 
As  Mrs.  Armiger  says,  the  book's  in  the  air:  one 
breathes  it  in  like  the  influenza." 

Glennard  sat  motionless,  watching  his  wife. 

"  Perhaps  it  has  n't  reached  the  suburbs  yet,"  she 
said  with  her  unruffled  smile. 

"  Oh,  do  let  me  come  to  you,  then ! "  Mrs. 
Touchett  cried ;  "  anything  for  a  change  of  air ! 
I'm  positively  sick  of  the  book  and  I  can't  put 
it  down.  Can't  you  sail  us  beyond  its  reach,  Mr. 
Flamel?" 

Flamel  shook  his  head.  "Not  even  with  this 
breeze.  Literature  travels  faster  than  steam  now 
adays.  And  the  worst  of  it  is  that  we  can't  any  of  us 
give  up  reading:  it's  as  insidious  as  a  vice  and  as 
tiresome  as  a  virtue." 

"  I  believe  it  is  a  vice,  almost,  to  read  such  a  book 
as  the  Letters?  said  Mrs.  Touchett.  "It's  the  wo 
man's  soul,  absolutely  torn  up  by  the  roots — her 
whole  self  laid  bare;  and  to  a  man  who  evidently 
did  n't  care ;  who  could  n't  have  cared.  I  don't  mean 
[67] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

to  read  another  line :  it 's  too  much  like  listening  at 
a  keyhole."" 

"  But  if  she  wanted  it  published  ?  " 

"  Wanted  it  ?  How  do  we  know  she  did  ?  " 

"Why,  I  heard  she'd  left  the  letters  to  the  man 
— whoever  he  is — with  directions  that  they  should 
be  published  after  his  death — " 

"I  don't  believe  it,"  Mrs.  Touchett  declared. 

"  He 's  dead  then,  is  he  ?  "  one  of  the  men  asked. 

"  Why,  you  don't  suppose  if  he  were  alive  he  could 
ever  hold  up  his  head  again,  with  these  letters  being 
read  by  everybody  ? "  Mrs.  Touchett  protested.  "  It 
must  have  been  horrible  enough  to  know  they  'd  been 
written  to  him ;  but  to  publish  them  !  No  man  could 
have  done  it  and  no  woman  could  have  told  him  to — " 

"  Oh,  come,  come,"  Dresham  judicially  interposed ; 
"  after  all,  they  're  not  love-letters." 

"  No — that 's  the  worst  of  it ;  they  're  unloved  let 
ters,"  Mrs.  Touchett  retorted. 

"  Then,  obviously,  she  need  n't  have  written  them ; 
whereas  the  man,  poor  devil,  could  hardly  help  re 
ceiving  them." 

[68] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"Perhaps  he  counted  on  the  public  to  save  him 
the  trouble  of  reading  them,"  said  young  Hartly, 
who  was  in  the  cynical  stage. 

Mrs.  Armiger  turned  her  reproachful  loveliness  to 
Dresham.  "From  the  way  you  defend  him  I  believe 
you  know  who  he  is." 

Every  one  looked  at  Dresham,  and  his  wife  smiled 
with  the  superior  air  of  the  woman  who  is  in  her 
husband's  professional  secrets.  Dresham  shrugged  his 
shoulders. 

"  What  have  I  said  to  defend  him  ?  " 

"  You  called  him  a  poor  devil — you  pitied  him." 

"  A  man  who  could  let  Margaret  Aubyn  write  to 
him  in  that  way  ?  Of  course  I  pity  him." 

"Then  you  must  know  who  he  is,"  cried  Mrs. 
Armiger  with  a  triumphant  air  of  penetration. 

Hartly  and  Flamel  laughed  and  Dresham  shook 
his  head.  "  No  one  knows ;  not  even  the  publishers ; 
so  they  tell  me  at  least." 

"So  they  tell  you  to  tell  us,"  Hartly  astutely 
amended;  and  Mrs.  Armiger  added,  with  the  ap 
pearance  of  carrying  the  argument  a  point  farther, 
[69] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"But  even  if  he^s  dead  and  she^s  dead,  somebody 
must  have  given  the  letters  to  the  publishers." 

"  A  little  bird,  probably,"  said  Dresham,  smiling 
indulgently  on  her  deduction. 

"A  little  bird  of  prey  then — a  vulture,  I  should 
say — "  another  man  interpolated. 

"Oh,  I'm  not  with  you  there,"  said  Dresham 
easily.  "  Those  letters  belonged  to  the  public." 

"  How  can  any  letters  belong  to  the  public  that 
were  n't  written  to  the  public  ? "  Mrs.  Touchett  in 
terposed. 

"Well,  these  were,  in  a  sense.  A  personality  as 
big  as  Margaret  Aubyn's  belongs  to  the  world.  Such 
a  mind  is  part  of  the  generaLjfund  of  thought.  It's 
the  penalty  of  greatness — one  becomes  a  monument 
historique.  Posterity  pays  the  cost  of  keeping  one 
up,  but  on  condition  that  one  is  always  open  to  the 
public." 

"I  don't  see  that  that  exonerates  the  man  who 
gives  up  the  keys  of  the  sanctuary,  as  it  were." 

"  Who  was  he  ?  "  another  voice  inquired. 

"  Who  was  he  ?  Oh,  nobody,  I  fancy — the  letter- 
[70] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

box,  the  slit  in  the  wall  through  which  the  letters 
passed  to  posterity.  .  .  ." 

"  But  she  never  meant  them  for  posterity  ! " 

"A  woman  shouldn't  write  such  letters  if  she 
does  n't  mean  them  to  be  published.  .  .  ." 

"  She  should  n't  write  them  to  such  a  man  ! "  Mrs. 
Touchett  scornfully  corrected. 

"I  never  keep  letters,"  said  Mrs.  Armiger,  under 
the  obvious  impression  that  she  was  contributing  a 
valuable  point  to  the  discussion. 

There  was  a  general  laugh,  and  Flamel,  who  had 
not  spoken,  said  lazily,  "  You  women  are  too  incur 
ably  subjective.  I  venture  to  say  that  most  men 
would  see  in  those  letters  merely  their  immense  lit 
erary  value,  their  significance  as  documents.  The 
personal  side  doesn't  count  where  there's  so  much 
else." 

"Oh,  we  all  know  you  haven't  any  principles," 
Mrs.  Armiger  declared ;  and  Alexa  Glennard,  lifting 
an  indolent  smile,  said :  "  I  shall  never  [write  you  a 
love-letter,  Mr.  Flamel." 

Glennard  moved  away  impatiently.  Such  talk  was 
[71] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

as  tedious  as  the  buzzing  of  gnats.  He  wondered  why 
his  wife  had  wanted  to  drag  him  on  such  a  senseless 
expedition.  .  .  .  He  hated  FlamePs  crowd — and  what 
business  had  Flamel  himself  to  interfere  in  that  way, 
standing  up  for  the  publication  of  the  letters  as 
though  Glennard  needed  his  defence  ?  .  .  . 

Glennard  turned  his  head  and  saw  that  Flamel 
had  drawn  a  seat  to  Alexa's  elbow  and  was  speaking 
to  her  in  a  low  tone.  The  other  groups  had  scattered, 
straying  in  twos  along  the  deck.  It  came  over  Glen 
nard  that  he  should  never  again  be  able  to  see 
Flamel  speaking  to  his  wife  without  the  sense  of 
sick  mistrust  that  now  loosened  his  joints.  .  .  . 

Alexa,  the  next  morning,  over  their  early  break 
fast,  surprised  her  husband  by  an  unexpected  re 
quest. 

"  Will  you  bring  me  those  letters  from  town  ? " 
she  asked. 

"  What  letters  ? "  he  said,  putting  down  his  cup. 
He  felt  himself  as  vulnerable  as  a  man  who  is  lunged 
at  in  the  dark. 

[72] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"Mrs.  Aubyn's.  The  book  they  were  all  talking 
about  yesterday." 

Glennard,  carefully  measuring  his  second  cup  of 
tea,  said  with  deliberation,  "I  didn't  know  you 
cared  about  that  sort  of  thing." 

She  was,  in  fact,  not  a  great  reader,  and  a  new 
book  seldom  reached  her  till  it  was,  so  to  speak,  on 
the  home  stretch ;  but  she  replied  with  a  gentle 
tenacity,  "  I  think  it  would  interest  me  because  I 
read  her  life  last  year."" 

"  Her  life  ?  Where  did  you  get  that  ?  " 

"  Some  one  lent  it  to  me  when  it  came  out — Mr. 
Flamel,  I  think." 

His  first  impulse  was  to  exclaim,  "  Why  the  devil 
do  you  borrow  books  of  Flamel  ?  I  can  buy  you  all 
you  want — "  but  he  felt  himself  irresistibly  forced 
into  an  attitude  of  smiling  compliance.  "Flamel 
always  has  the  newest  books  going,  has  n't  he  ?  You 
must  be  careful,  by  the  way,  about  returning  what 
he  lends  you.  He's  rather  crotchety  about  his  li 
brary." 

"Oh,  I'm  always  very  careful,"  she  said,  with  a 
[73] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

touch  of  competence  that  struck  him ;  and  she 
added,  as  he  caught  up  his  hat:  "Don't  forget  the 
letters." 

Why  had  she  asked  for  the  book  ?  Was  her  sudden 
wish  to  see  it  the  result  of  some  hint  of  FlamePs? 
The  thought  turned  Glennard  sick,  but  he  preserved 
sufficient  lucidity  to  tell  himself,  a  moment  later, 
that  his  last  hope  of  self-control  would  be  lost  if  he 
yielded  to  the  temptation  of  seeing  a  hidden  purpose 
in  everything  she  said  and  did.  How  much  Flamel 
guessed,  he  had  no  means  of  divining ;  nor  could  he 
predicate,  from  what  he  knew  of  the  man,  to  what 
use  his  inferences  might  be  put.  The  very  qualities 
that  had  made  Flamel  a  useful  adviser  made  him  the 
most  dangerous  of  accomplices.  Glennard  felt  him 
self  agrope  among  alien  forces  that  his  own  act  had 
set  in  motion.  .  .  . 

Alexa  was  a  woman  of  few  requirements ;  but  her 
wishes,  even  in  trifles,  had  a  definiteness  that  distin 
guished  them  from  the  fluid  impulses  of  her  kind. 
He  knew  that,  having  once  asked  for  the  book,  she 
would  not  forget  it ;  and  he  put  aside,  as  an  inefFec- 
[74] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

tual  expedient,  his  momentary  idea  of  applying  for 
it  at  the  circulating  library  and  telling  her  that  all 
the  copies  were  out.  If  the  book  was  to  be  bought, 
it  had  better  be  bought  at  once.  He  left  his  office 
earlier  than  usual  and  turned  in  at  the  first  book 
shop  on  his  way  to  the  train.  The  show-window  was 
stacked  with  conspicuously  lettered  volumes.  Mar 
garet  Aubyn  flashed  back  at  him  in  endless  iteration. 
He  plunged  into  the  shop  and  came  on  a  counter 
where  the  name  repeated  itself  on  row  after  row  of 
bindings.  It  seemed  to  have  driven  the  rest  of  litera 
ture  to  the  back  shelves.  He  caught  up  a  copy,  toss 
ing  the  money  to  an  astonished  clerk,  who  pursued 
him  to  the  door  with  the  unheeded  offer  to  wrap  up 
the  volumes. 

In  the  street  he  was  seized  with  a  sudden  appre 
hension.  What  if  he  were  to  meet  Flamel?  The 
thought  was  intolerable.  He  called  a  cab  and  drove 
straight  to  the  station,  where,  amid  the  palm-leaf 
fans  of  a  perspiring  crowd,  he  waited  a  long  half- 
hour  for  his  train  to  start. 

He  had  thrust  a  volume  in  either  pocket,  and  in 
[75] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

the  train  he  dared  not  draw  them  out ;  but  the  de 
tested  words  leaped  at  him  from  the  folds  of  the 
evening  paper.  The  air  seemed  full  of  Margaret 
Aubyn's  name ;  the  motion  of  the  train  set  it  danc 
ing  up  and  down  on  the  page  of  a  magazine  that  a 
man  in  front  of  him  was  reading.  .  .  . 

At  the  door  he  was  told  that  Mrs.  Glennard  was 
still  out,  and  he  went  upstairs  to  his  room  and 
dragged  the  books  from  his  pocket.  They  lay  on 
the  table  before  him  like  live  things  that  he  feared 
to  touch.  ...  At  length  he  opened  the  first  vol 
ume.  A  familiar  letter  sprang  out  at  him,  each  word 
quickened  by  its  glaring  garb  of  type.  The  little 
broken  phrases  fled  across  the  page  like  wounded 
animals  in  the  open.  ...  It  was  a  horrible  sight 
...  a  battue  of  helpless  things  driven  savagely  out 
of  shelter.  He  had  not  known  it  would  be  like 
this.  .  .  . 

He  understood  now  that,  at  the  moment  of  selling 

the  letters,  he  had  viewed  the  transaction  solely  as 

it  affected  himself:  as  an  unfortunate  blemish  on  an 

otherwise  presentable  record.  He  had  scarcely  con- 

[76] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

sidered  the  act  in  relation  to  Margaret  Aubyn ;  for 
death,  if  it  hallows,  also  makes  innocuous.  Glennard's 
God  was  a  god  of  the  living,  of  the  immediate,  the 
actual,  the  tangible;  all  his  days  he  had  lived  in 
the  presence  of  that  god,  heedless  of  the  divinities 
who,  below  the  surface  of  our  deeds  and  passions, 
silently  forge  the  fatal  weapons  of  the  dead. 


[77] 


VII 

A  KNOCK  roused  him,  and  looking  up  he  saw 
his  wife.  He  met  her  glance  in  silence,  and  she 
faltered  out,  "  Are  you  ill  ?  " 

The  words  restored  his  self-possession.  "111?  Of 
course  not.  They  told  me  you  were  out  and  I  came 
upstairs." 

The  books  lay  between  them  on  the  table;  he 
wondered  when  she  would  see  them.  She  lingered 
tentatively  on  the  threshold,  with  the  air  of  leaving 
his  explanation  on  his  hands.  She  was  not  the  kind 
of  woman  who  could  be  counted  on  to  fortify  an  ex 
cuse  by  appearing  to  dispute  it. 

"  Where  have  you  been  ?  "  Glennard  asked,  moving 
forward  so  that  he  obstructed  her  vision  of  the  books. 

"  I  walked  over  to  the  Dreshams1  for  tea." 

"I  can't  think  what  you  see  in  those  people,"  he 
said  with  a  shrug ;  adding,  uncontrollably — "  I  sup 
pose  Flamel  was  there  ?  " 

"  No ;  he  left  on  the  yacht  this  morning." 

An  answer  so  obstructing  to  the  natural  escape  of 
his  irritation  left  Glennard  with  no  momentary  re- 
[78] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

source  but  that  of  strolling  impatiently  to  the  win 
dow.  As  her  eyes  followed  him  they  lit  on  the  books. 

"  Ah,  you  Ve  brought  them !  I  'm  so  glad,"  she 
said. 

He  answered  over  his  shoulder,  "For  a  woman 
who  never  reads  you  make  the  most  astounding  ex 
ceptions  ! " 

Her  smile  was  an  exasperating  concession  to  the 
probability  that  it  had  been  hot  in  town  or  that 
something  had  bothered  him. 

"  Do  you  mean  it 's  not  nice  to  want  to  read  the 
book  ? "  she  asked.  "  It  was  not  nice  to  publish  it, 
certainly ;  but  after  all,  I  'm  not  responsible  for  that, 
am  I  ?  "  She  paused,  and,  as  he  made  no  answer,  went 
on,  still  smiling,  "I  do  read  sometimes,  you  know; 
and  I'm  very  fond  of  Margaret  Aubyn's  books.  I 
was  reading  Pomegranate  Seed  when  we  first  met. 
Don't  you  remember?  It  was  then  you  told  me  all 
about  her." 

Glennard  had  turned  back  into  the  room  and 
stood  staring  at  his  wife.  "All  about  her?"  he  re 
peated,  and  with  the  words  remembrance  came  to 
[79] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

him.  He  had  found  Miss  Trent  one  afternoon  with 
the  novel  in  her  hand,  and  moved  by  the  lover's 
fatuous  impulse  to  associate  himself  in  some  way 
with  whatever  fills  the  mind  of  the  beloved,  had 
broken  through  his  habitual  silence  about  the  past. 
Rewarded  by  the  consciousness  of  figuring  impres 
sively  in  Miss  Trent's  imagination,  he  had  gone  on 
from  one  anecdote  to  another,  reviving  dormant  de 
tails  of  his  old  Hillbridge  life,  and  pasturing  his 
vanity  on  the  eagerness  with  which  she  listened  to 
his  reminiscences  of  a  being  already  clothed  in  the 
impersonality  of  greatness. 

The  incident  had  left  no  trace  in  his  mind;  but 
it  sprang  up  now  like  an  old  enemy,  the  more  dan 
gerous  for  having  been  forgotten.  The  instinct  of 
self-preservation — sometimes  the  most  perilous  that 
man  can  exercise  —  made  him  awkwardly  declare  : 
"  Oh,  I  used  to  see  her  at  people's  houses,  that  was 
all;"  and  her  silence  as  usual  leaving  room  for  a 
multiplication  of  blunders,  he  added,  with  increased 
indifference,  "  I  simply  can't  see  what  you  can  find 
to  interest  you  in  such  a  book." 
[80] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

She  seemed  to  consider  this  intently.  "You've 
read  it,  then?" 

"I  glanced  at  it — I  never  read  such  things.1' 

"  Is  it  true  that  she  did  n't  wish  the  letters  to  be 
published  ?  " 

Glennard  felt  the  sudden  dizziness  of  the  moun 
taineer  on  a  narrow  ledge,  and  with  it  the  sense  that 
he  was  lost  if  he  looked  more  than  a  step  ahead. 

"  I  'm  sure  I  don't  know,"  he  said ;  then,  summon 
ing  a  smile,  he  passed  his  hand  through  her  arm.  "  / 
did  n't  have  tea  at  the  Dreshams',  you  know ;  won't 
you  give  me  some  now  ?  "  he  suggested. 

That  evening  Glennard,  under  pretext  of  work  to 
be  done,  shut  himself  into  the  small  study  opening 
off  the  drawing-room.  As  he  gathered  up  his  papers 
he  said  to  his  wife:  "You're  not  going  to  sit  in 
doors  on  such  a  night  as  this  ?  I  '11  join  you  presently 
outside." 

But  she  had  drawn  her  arm-chair  to  the  lamp.  "I 
want  to  look  at  my  book,"  she  said,  taking  up  the 
first  volume  of  the  Letters. 

[81] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

Glennard,  with  a  shrug,  withdrew  into  the  study. 
"I'm  going  to  shut  the  door;  I  want  to  be  quiet," 
he  explained  from  the  threshold;  and  she  nodded 
without  lifting  her  eyes  from  the  book. 

He  sank  into  a  chair,  staring  aimlessly  at  the  out 
spread  papers.  How  was  he  to  work,  while  on  the 
other  side  of  the  door  she  sat  with  that  volume  in 
her  hand  ?  The  door  did  not  shut  her  out — he  saw 
her  distinctly,  felt  her  close  to  him  in  a  contact  as 
painful  as  the  pressure  on  a  bruise. 

The  sensation  was  part  of  the  general  strangeness 
that  made  him  feel  like  a  man  waking  from  a  long 
sleep  to  find  himself  in  an  unknown  country  among 
people  of  alien  tongue.  We  live  in  our  own  souls  as 
in  an  unmapped  region,  a  few  acres  of  which  we 
have  cleared  for  our  habitation ;  while  of  the  nature 
|  of  those  nearest  us  we  know  but  the  boundaries  that 
march  with  ours.  Of  the  points  in  his  wife's  char 
acter  not  in  direct  contact  with  his  own,  Glennard 
now  discerned  his  ignorance;  and  the  baffling  sense 
of  her  remoteness  was  intensified  by  the  discovery 
that,  in  one  way,  she  was  closer  to  him  than  ever 
[82] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

before.  As  one  may  live  for  years  in  happy  uncon 
sciousness  of  the  possession  of  a  sensitive  nerve,  he 
had  lived  beside  his  wife  unaware  that  her  individu 
ality  had  become  a  part  of  the  texture  of  his  life, 
ineradicable  as  some  growth  on  a  vital  organ ;  and 
he  now  felt  himself  at  once  incapable  of  forecasting 
her  judgment  and  powerless  to  evade  its  effects. 
To  escape,  the  next  morning,  the  confidences  of 

the  breakfast-table,  he  went  to  town  earlier  than 

t 

usual.  His  wife,  who_read  slowly,  was  given  to  talk 
ing  over  what  she  read,  and  at  present  his  first  ob 
ject  in  life  was  to  postpone  the  inevitable  discussion 
of  the  letters.  This  instinct  of  protection,  in  the  af 
ternoon,  on  his  way  up  town,  guided  him  to  the  club 
in  search  of  a  man  who  might  be  persuaded  to  come 
out  to  the  country  to  dine.  The  only  man  in  the 
club  was  Flamel. 

Glennard,  as  he  heard  himself  almost  involuntarily 
pressing  Flamel  to  come  and  dine,  felt  the  full  irony 
of  the  situation.  To  use  Flamel  as  a  shield  against  his 
wife's  scrutiny  was  only  a  shade  less  humiliating  than 
to  reckon  on  his  wife  as  a  defence  against  Flamel. 
[83] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

He  felt  a  contradictory  movement  of  annoyance  at 
the  latter's  ready  acceptance,  and  the  two  men  drove 
in  silence  to  the  station.  As  they  passed  the  book 
stall  in  the  waiting-room  Flamel  lingered  a  moment, 
and  the  eyes  of  both  fell  on  Margaret  Aubyn's  name, 
conspicuously  displayed  above  a  counter  stacked  with 
the  familiar  volumes. 

"  We  shall  be  late,  you  know,""  Glennard  remon 
strated,  pulling  out  his  watch. 

"  Go  ahead,"  said  Flamel  imperturbably.  "  I  want 
to  get  something — " 

Glennard  turned  on  his  heel  and  walked  down  the 
platform.  Flamel  rejoined  him  with  an  innocent- 
looking  magazine  in  his  hand;  but  Glennard  dared 
not  even  glance  at  the  cover,  lest  it  should  show  the 
syllables  he  feared. 

The  train  was  full  of  people  they  knew,  and  they 
were  kept  apart  till  it  dropped  them  at  the  little 
suburban  station.  As  they  strolled  up  the  shaded 
hill,  Glennard  talked  volubly,  pointing  out  the 
improvements  in  the  neighborhood,  deploring  the 
threatened  approach  of  an  electric  railway,  and 
[84] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

screening  himself  by  a  series  of  reflex  adjustments 
from  the  risk  of  any  allusion  to  the  Letters.  Flamel 
suffered  his  discourse  with  the  bland  inattention  that 
we  accord  to  the  affairs  of  some  one  else's  suburb, 
and  they  reached  the  shelter  of  Alexa's  tea-table 
without  a  perceptible  turn  toward  the  dreaded 
topic. 

The  dinner  passed  off  safely.  Flamel,  always  at  his 
best  in  Alexa's  presence,  gave  her  the  kind  of  atten 
tion  which  is  like  a  becoming  light  thrown  on  the 
speaker's  words :  his  answers  seemed  to  bring  out  a 
latent  significance  in  her  phrases,  as  the  sculptor 
draws  his  statue  from  the  block.  Glennard,  under 
his  wife's  composure,  detected  a  sensibility  to  this 
manoeuvre,  and  the  discovery  was  like  the  lightning- 
flash  across  a  nocturnal  landscape.  Thus  far  these 
momentary  illuminations  had  served  only  to  reveal 
the  strangeness  of  the  intervening  country :  each 
fresh  observation  seemed  to  increase  the  sum-total 
of  his  ignorance.  Her  simplicity  of  outline  was  more 
puzzling  than  a  complex  surface.  One  may  conceiv 
ably  work  one's  way  through  a  labyrinth ;  but  Alexa's 
[85] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

candor  was  like  a  snow-covered  plain,  where,  the  road 
once  lost,  there  are  no  landmarks  to  travel  by. 

Dinner  over,  they  returned  to  the  veranda,  where 
a  moon,  rising  behind  the  old  elm,  was  combining 
with  that  complaisant  tree  a  romantic  enlargement 
of  their  borders.  Glennard  had  forgotten  the  cigars. 
He  went  to  his  study  to  fetch  them,  and  in  passing 
through  the  drawing-room  he  saw  the  second  volume 
of  the  Letters  lying  open  on  his  wife's  table.  He 
picked  up  the  book  and  looked  at  the  date  of  the 
letter  she  had  been  reading.  It  was  one  of  the  last 
...  he  knew  the  few  lines  by  heart.  He  dropped  the 
book  and  leaned  against  the  wall.  Why  had  he  in 
cluded  that  one  among  the  others  ?  Or  was  it  possi 
ble  that  now  they  would  all  seem  like  that  .  .  .  ? 

Alexa's  voice  came  suddenly  out  of  the  dusk. 
"May  Touchett  was  right — it  is  like  listening  at  a 
keyhole.  I  wish  I  had  n't  read  it ! "  [ 

Flamel  returned,  in  the  leisurely  tone  of  the  man 
whose  phrases  are  punctuated  by  a  cigarette,  "It 
seems  so  to  us,  perhaps;  but  to  another  generation 
the  book  will  be  a  classic." 

[86] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"Then  it  ought  not  to  have  been  published  till 
it  had  time  to  become  a  classic.  It's  horrible,  it's 
degrading  almost,  to  read  the  secrets  of  a  woman 
one  might  have  known."  She  added,  in  a  lower  tone, 
"  Stephen  did  know  her — " 

"  Did  he  ?  "  came  from  Flamel. 

"  He  knew  her  very  well,  at  Hillbridge,  years  ago. 
The  book  has  made  him  feel  dreadfully  ...  he 
would  n't  read  it  ...  he  did  n't  want  me  to  read  it. 
I  did  n't  understand  at  first,  but  now  I  can  see  how 
horribly  disloyal  it  must  seem  to  him.  It's  so  much 
worse  to  surprise  a  friend's  secrets  than  a  stranger's." 

"Oh,  Glennard's  such  a  sensitive  chap,"  Flamel 
said  easily;  and  Alexa  almost  rebukingly  rejoined, 
"If  you'd  known  her  I'm  sure  you'd  feel  as  he 
does.  .  .  ." 

Glennard  stood  motionless,  overcome  by  the  sin 
gular  infelicity  with  which  he  had  contrived  to  put 
Flamel  in  possession  of  the  two  points  most  damag 
ing  to  his  case :  the  fact  that  he  had  been  a  friend 
of  Margaret  Aubyn's  and  that  he  had  concealed 
from  Alexa  his  share  in  the  publication  of  the  let- 
[87] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

ters.  To  a  man  of  less  than  FlameFs  astuteness  it 
must  now  be  clear  to  whom  the  letters  were  ad 
dressed  ;  and  the  possibility  once  suggested,  nothing 
could  be  easier  than  to  confirm  it  by  discreet  re 
search.  An  impulse  of  self-accusal  drove  Glennard  to 
the  window.  Why  not  anticipate  betrayal  by  telling 
his  wife  the  truth  in  FlameFs  presence  ?  If  the  man 
had  a  drop  of  decent  feeling  in  him,  such  a  course 
would  be  the  surest  means  of  securing  his  silence; 
and  above  all,  it  would  rid  Glennard  of  the  necessity 
of  defending  himself  against  the  perpetual  criticism 
of  his  wife's  belief  in  him.  .  .  . 

The  impulse  was  strong  enough  to  carry  him  to 
the  window ;  but  there  a  reaction  of  defiance  set  in. 
What  had  he  done,  after  all,  to  need  defence  and 
explanation  ?  Both  Dresham  and  Flamel  had,  in  his 
hearing,  declared  the  publication  of  the  letters  to  be 
not  only  justifiable  but  obligatory ;  and  if  the  disin 
terestedness  of  FlameFs  verdict  might  be  questioned, 
Dresham's  at  least  represented  the  impartial  view  of 
the  man  of  letters.  As  to  Alexa's  words,  they  were 
simply  the  conventional  utterance  of  the  "  nice  "  wo- 
[88] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

man  on  a  question  already  decided  for  her  by  other 
"nice"  women.  She  had  said  the  proper  thing  as 
mechanically  as  she  would  have  put  on  the  appro 
priate  gown  or  written  the  correct  form  of  dinner 
invitation.  Glennard  had  small  faith  in  the  abstract 
judgments  of  the  other  sex :  he  knew  that  half  the 
women  who  were  horrified  by  the  publication  of 
Mrs.  Aubyn's  letters  would  have  betrayed  her  secrets 
without  a  scruple. 

The  sudden  lowering  of  his  emotional  pitch 
brought  a  proportionate  relief.  He  told  himself 
that  now  the  worst  was  over  and  things  would  fall 
into  perspective  again.  His  wife  and  Flamel  had 
turned  to  other  topics,  and  coming  out  on  the 
veranda,  he  handed  the  cigars  to  Flamel,  saying 
cheerfully — and  yet  he  could  have  sworn  they  were 
the  last  words  he  meant  to  utter! — "Look  here, 
old  man,  before  you  go  down  to  Newport  you  must 
come  out  and  spend  a  few  days  with  us — mustn't 
he,  Alexa?" 


[89] 


VIII 

GLENN  ARD,  perhaps  unconsciously,  had  counted 
on  the  continuance  of  this  easier  mood.  He  had 
always  taken  pride  in  a  certain  robustness  of  fibre 
that  enabled  him  to  harden  himself  against  the  in 
evitable,  to  convert  his  failures  into  the  building 
materials  of  success.  Though  it  did  not  even  now 
occur  to  him  that  what  he  called  the  inevitable  had 
hitherto  been  the  alternative  he  happened  to  prefer, 
he  was  yet  obscurely  aware  that  his  present  diffi 
culty  was  one  not  to  be  conjured  by  any  affectation 
of  indifference.  Some  griefs  build  the  soul  a  spacious 
house,  but  in  this  misery  of  Glennard's  he  could 
not  stand  upright.  It  pressed  against  him  at  every 
turn.  He  told  himself  that  this  was  because  there 
was  no  escape  from  the  visible  evidences  of  his  act. 
The  Letters  confronted  him  everywhere.  People  who 
had  never  opened  a  book  discussed  them  with  criti 
cal  reservations;  to  have  read  them  had  become  a 
social  obligation  in  circles  to  which  literature  never 
penetrates  except  in  a  personal  guise. 

Glennard  did  himself  injustice.  It  was  from  the 
*  [  90  ] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE     ^H-  , 

unexpected  discovery  of  his  own  pettiness  that  he 
chiefly  suffered.  Our  self-esteem  is  apt  to  be  based 
on  the  hypothetical  great  act  we  have  never  had 
occasion  to  perform ;  and  even  the  most  self-scruti 
nizing  modesty  credits  itself  negatively  with  a  high 
standard  of  conduct.  Glennard  had  never  thought 
himself  a  hero;  but  he  had  been  certain  that  he 
was  incapable  of  baseness.  We  all  like  our  wrong 
doings  to  have  a  becoming  cut,  to  be  made  to  or 
der,  as  it  were;  and  Glennard  found  himself  sud 
denly  thrust  into  a  garb  of  dishonor  surely  meant 
for  a  meaner  figure. 

The  immediate  result  of  his  first  weeks  of  wretch 
edness  was  the  resolve  to  go  to  town  for  the  winter. 
He  knew  that  such  a  course  was  just  beyond  the 
limit  of  prudence ;  but  it  was  easy  to  allay  the  fears 
of  Alexa,  who,  scrupulously  vigilant  in  the  manage 
ment  of  the  household,  preserved  the  American 
wife's  usual  aloofness  from  her  husband's  business 
cares.  Glennard  felt  that  he  could  not  trust  himself 
to  a  winter's  solitude  with  her.  He  had  an  unspeak 
able  dread  of  her  learning  the  truth  about  the  let- 
[91] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

ters,  yet  could  not  be  sure  of  steeling  himself  against 
the  suicidal  impulse  of  avowal.  His  very  soul  was 
parched  for  sympathy;  he  thirsted  for  a  voice  of 
pity  and  comprehension.  But  would  his  wife  pity? 
Would  she  understand?  Again  he  found  himself 
brought  up  abruptly  against  his  incredible  igno- 
I  ranee  of  her  nature.  The  fact  that  he  knew  well 
.  enough  how  she  would  behave  in  the  ordinary  emer 
gencies  of  life,  that  he  could  count,  in  such  contin 
gencies,  on  the  kind  of  high  courage  and  directness 
he  had  always  divined  in  her,  made  him  the  more 
hopeless  of  her  entering  into  the  tortuous  psychol 
ogy  of  an  act  that  he  himself  could  no  longer  ex- 
'  plain  or  understand.  It  would  have  been  easier  had 
she  been  more  complex,  more  feminine — if  he  could 
'have  counted  on  her  imaginative  sympathy  or  her 
moral  obtuseness — but  he  was  sure  of  neither.  He 
was  sure  of  nothing  but  that,  for  a  time,  he  must 
avoid  her.  Glennard  could  not  rid  himself  of  the 
delusion  that  by  and  by  his  action  would  cease  to 
make  its  consequences  felt.  He  would  not  have  cared 
to  own  to  himself  that  he  counted  on  the  dulling  of 
[92] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

his  sensibilities :  he  preferred  to  indulge  the  vague  hy 
pothesis  that  extraneous  circumstances  would  some 
how  efface  the  blot  upon  his  conscience.  In  his  worst 
moments  of  self-abasement  he  tried  to  find  solace  in 
the  thought  that  Flamel  had  sanctioned  his  course. 
Flamel,  at  the  outset,  must  have  guessed  to  whom 
the  letters  were  addressed;  yet  neither  then  nor 
afterward  had  he  hesitated  to  advise  their  publi 
cation.  This  thought  drew  Glennard  to  him  in  fit 
ful  impulses  of  friendliness,  from  each  of  which 
there  was  a  sharper  reaction  of  distrust  and  aver 
sion.  When  Flamel  was  not  at  the  house,  he  missed 
the  support  of  his  tacit  connivance ;  when  he  was 
there,  his  presence  seemed  the  assertion  of  an  in 
tolerable  claim. 

Early  in  the  winter  the  Glennards  took  possession 
of  the  little  house  that  was  to  cost  them  almost 
nothing.  The  change  brought  Glennard  the  relief 
of  seeing  less  of  his  wife,  and  of  being  protected, 
in  her  presence,  by  the  multiplied  preoccupations 
of  town  life.  Alexa,  who  could  never  appear  hurried, 
showed  the  smiling  abstraction  of  a  pretty  woman 
[93] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

to  whom  the  social  side  of  married  life  has  not  lost 
its  novelty.  Glennard,  with  the  recklessness  of  a  man 
fresh  from  his  first  financial  imprudence,  encouraged 
her  in  such  little  extravagances  as  her  good  sense 
at  first  resisted.  Since  they  had  come  to  town,  he 
argued,  they  might  as  well  enjoy  themselves.  He 
took  a  sympathetic  view  of  the  necessity  of  new 
gowns,  he  gave  her  a  set  of  furs  at  Christmas,  and  be 
fore  the  New  Year  they  had  agreed  on  the  necessity 
of  adding  a  parlor-maid  to  their  small  establishment. 
Providence  the  very  next  day  hastened  to  justify 
this  measure  by  placing  on  Glennard's  breakfast- 
plate  an  envelope  bearing  the  name  of  the  publishers 
to  whom  he  had  sold  Mrs.  Aubyn's  letters.  It  hap 
pened  to  be  the  only  letter  the  early  post  had 
brought,  and  he  glanced  across  the  table  at  his  wife, 
who  had  come  down  before  him  and  had  probably 
laid  the  envelope  on  his  plate.  She  was  not  the  wo 
man  to  ask  awkward  questions,  but  he  felt  the  con 
jecture  of  her  glance,  and  he  was  debating  whether 
to  affect  surprise  at  the  receipt  of  the  letter,  or  to 
pass  it  off  as  a  business  communication  that  had 
[94] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

strayed  to  his  house,  when  a  check  fell  from  the 
envelope.  It  was  the  royalty  on  the  first  edition  of 
the  letters.  His  first  feeling  was  one  of  simple  satis 
faction.  The  money  had  come  with  such  infernal 
opportuneness  that  he  could  not  help  welcoming  it. 
Before  long,  too,  there  would  be  more ;  he  knew  the 
book  was  still  selling  far  beyond  the  publishers'  pre 
visions.  He  put  the  check  in  his  pocket  and  left  the 
room  without  looking  at  his  wife. 

On  the  way  to  his  office  the  habitual  reaction  set 
in.  The  money  he  had  received  was  the  first  tangible 
reminder  that  he  was  living  on  the  sale  of  his  self- 
esteem.  The  thought  of  material  benefit  had  been 
overshadowed  by  his  sense  of  the  intrinsic  baseness 
of  making  the  letters  known :  now  he  saw  what  an 
element  of  sordidness  it  added  to  the  situation  and 
how  the  fact  that  he  needed  the  money,  and  must 
use  it,  pledged  him  more  irrevocably  than  ever  to 
the  consequences  of  his  act.  It  seemed  to  him,  in 
that  first  hour  of  misery,  that  he  had  betrayed  his 
friend  anew. 

When,  that  afternoon,  he  reached  home  earlier 
[95] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

than  usual,  Alexa's  drawing-room  was  full  of  a  gay- 
ety  that  overflowed  to  the  stairs.  Flamel,  for  a  won 
der,  was  not  there ;  but  Dresham  and  young  Hartly, 
grouped  about  the  tea-table,  were  receiving  with 
resonant  mirth  a  narrative  delivered  in  the  fluttered 
staccato  that  made  Mrs.  Armiger's  conversation  like 
the  ejaculations  of  a  startled  aviary. 

She  paused  as  Glennard  entered,  and  he  had 
time  to  notice  that  his  wife,  who  was  busied  about 
the  tea-tray,  had  not  joined  in  the  laughter  of  the 
men. 

"Oh,  go  on,  go  on,"  young  Hartly  rapturously 
groaned;  and  Mrs.  Armiger  met  Glennard's  inquiry 
with  the  deprecating  cry  that  really  she  didn't  see 
what  there  was  to  laugh  at.  "  I  'm  sure  I  feel  more 
like  crying.  I  don't  know  what  I  should  have  done 
if  Alexa  had  n't  been  at  home  to  give  me  a  cup  of 
tea.  My  nerves  are  in  shreds — yes,  another,  dear, 
please — "  and  as  Glennard  looked  his  perplexity, 
she  went  on,  after  pondering  on  the  selection  of  a 
second  lump  of  sugar,  "Why,  I've  just  come  from 
the  reading,  you  know — the  reading  at  the  Waldorf." 
[96] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"I  haven't  been  in  town  long  enough  to  know 
anything,"  said  Glennard,  taking  the  cup  his  wife 
handed  him.  "  Who  has  been  reading  what  ?  " 

"That  lovely  girl  from  the  South — Georgie — 
Georgie  What's-her-name — Mrs.  Dresham's  prote- 
ge'e — unless  she 's  yours^  Mr.  Dresham  !  Why,  the  big 
ball-room  was  packed,  and  all  the  women  were  crying 
like  idiots — it  was  the  most  harrowing  thing  I  ever 
heard—" 

"  What  did  you  hear  ?  "  Glennard  asked ;  and  his 
wife  interposed:  "Won't  you  have  another  bit  of 
cake,  Julia  ?  Or,  Stephen,  ring  for  some  hot  toast, 
please."  Her  tone  betrayed  a  polite  weariness  of  the 
topic  under  discussion.  Glennard  turned  to  the  bell, 
but  Mrs.  Armiger  pursued  him  with  her  lovely 
amazement. 

"Why,  the  Aubyn  Letters — didn't  you  know 
about  it?  She  read  them  so  beautifully  that  it  was 
quite  horrible — I  should  have  fainted  if  there  'd  been 
a  man  near  enough  to  carry  me  out." 

Hartly's  glee  redoubled,  and  Dresham  said  jovially, 
"How  like  you  women  to  raise  a  shriek  over  the  book 
[97] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

and  then  do  all  you  can  to  encourage  the  blatant 
publicity  of  the  readings  ! " 

Mrs.  Armiger  met  him  more  than  half-way  on  a 
torrent  of  self-accusal.  "It  was  horrid;  it  was  dis 
graceful.  I  told  your  wife  we  ought  all  to  be  ashamed 
of  ourselves  for  going,  and  I  think  Alexa  was  quite 
right  to  refuse  to  take  any  tickets — even  if  it  was 
for  a  charity ." 

"  Oh,"  her  hostess  murmured  indifferently,  "  with 
me  charity  begins  at  home.  I  can't  afford  emotional 
luxuries."" 

"A  charity?  A  charity?"  Hartly  exulted.  "I 
hadn't  seized  the  full  beauty  of  it.  Reading  poor 
Margaret  Aubyn's  love-letters  at  the  Waldorf  before 
five  hundred  people  for  a  charity  !  What  charity,  dear 
Mrs.  Armiger?" 

"  Why,  the  Home  for  Friendless  Women — " 

"It  was  well  chosen,"  Dresham  commented;  and 
Hartly  buried  his  mirth  in  the  sofa  cushions. 

When  they  were  alone  Glennard,  still  holding  his 
untouched  cup  of  tea,  turned  to  his  wife,  who  sat 
[98] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

silently  behind  the  kettle.  "  Who  asked  you  to  take 
a  ticket  for  that  reading  ?  " 

"  I  don't  know,  really — Kate  Dresham,  I  fancy.  It 
was  she  who  got  it  up." 

"It's  just  the  sort  of  damnable  vulgarity  she's 
capable  of!  It's  loathsome — it's  monstrous — " 

His  wife,  without  looking  up,  answered  gravely, 
"  I  thought  so  too.  It  was  for  that  reason  I  did  n't 
go.  But  you  must  remember  that  very  few  people 
feel  about  Mrs.  Aubyn  as  you  do — " 

Glennard  managed  to  set  down  his  cup  with  a 
steady  hand,  but  the  room  swung  round  with  him 
and  he  dropped  into  the  nearest  chair.  "As  I  do ? " 
he  repeated. 

"  I  mean  that  very  few  people  knew  her  when  she 
lived  in  New  York.  To  most  of  the  women  who  went 
to  the  reading  she  was  a  mere  name,  too  remote  to 
have  any  personality.  With  me,  of  course,  it  was 
different—" 

Glennard  gave  her  a  startled  look.  "Different? 
Why  different?" 

"  Since  you  were  her  friend — " 
[99] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

"Her  friend!"  He  stood  up.  "You  speak  as  if 
she  had  had  only  one — the  most  famous  woman  of 
her  day ! "  He  moved  vaguely  about  the  room,  bend 
ing  down  to  look  at  some  books  on  the  table.  "I 
hope,"  he  added,  "you  didn't  give  that  as  a  reason ?" 

"  A  reason  ?  " 

"For  not  going.  A  woman  who  gives  reasons  for 
getting  out  of  social  obligations  is  sure  to  make  her 
self  unpopular  or  ridiculous." 

The  words  were  uncalculated ;  but  in  an  instant 
he  saw  that  they  had  strangely  bridged  the  distance 
between  his  wife  and  himself.  He  felt  her  close  on 
him,  like  a  panting  foe ;  and  her  answer  was  a  flash 
that  showed  the  hand  on  the  trigger. 

"I  seem,"  she  said  from  the  threshold,  "to  have 
done  both  in  giving  my  reason  to  you." 

The  fact  that  they  were  dining  out  that  evening 
made  it  easy  for  him  to  avoid  Alexa  till  she  came 
downstairs  in  her  opera-cloak.  Mrs.  Touchett,  who 
was  going  to  the  same  dinner,  had  offered  to  call  for 
her;  and  Glennard,  refusing  a  precarious  seat  be- 
[100] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

tween  the  ladies'  draperies,  followed  on  foot.  The 
evening  was  interminable.  The  reading  at  the  Wal 
dorf,  at  which  all  the  women  had  been  present,  had 
revived  the  discussion  of  the  Aubyn  Letters,  and 
Glennard,  hearing  his  wife  questioned  as  to  her 
absence,  felt  himself  miserably  wishing  that  she  had 
gone,  rather  than  that  her  staying  away  should  have 
been  remarked.  He  was  rapidly  losing  all  sense  of 
proportion  where  the  Letters  were  concerned.  He 
could  no  longer  hear  them  mentioned  without  sus 
pecting  a  purpose  in  the  allusion;  he  even  yielded 
himself  for  a  moment  to  the  extravagance  of  im 
agining  that  Mrs.  Dresham,  whom  he  disliked,  had 
organized  the  reading  in  the  hope  of  making  him  be 
tray  himself — for  he  was  already  sure  that  Dresham 
had  divined  his  share  in  the  transaction. 

The  attempt  to  keep  a  smooth  surface  on  this 
inner  tumult  was  as  endless  and  unavailing  as  efforts 
made  in  a  nightmare.  He  lost  all  sense  of  what  he 
was  saying  to  his  neighbors ;  and  once  when  he  looked 
up  his  wife's  glance  struck  him  cold. 

She  sat  nearly  opposite  him,  at  Flamel's  side,  and 
[101  ] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

it  appeared  to  Glennard  that  they  had  built  about 
themselves  one  of  those  airy  barriers  of  talk  behind 
which  two  people  can  say  what  they  please.  While 
the  reading  was  discussed  they  were  silent.  Their  si 
lence  seemed  to  Glennard  almost  cynical — it  stripped 
the  last  disguise  from  their  complicity.  A  throb  of 
anger  rose  in  him,  but  suddenly  it  fell,  and  he  felt, 
with  a  curious  sense  of  relief,  that  at  bottom  he  no 
longer  cared  whether  Flamel  had  told  his  wife  or 
not.  The  assumption  that  Flamel  knew  about  the 
letters  had  become  a  fact  to  Glennard;  and  it  now 
seemed  to  him  better  that  Alexa  should  know  too. 

He  was  frightened  at  first  by  the  discovery  of  his 
own  indifference.  The  last  barriers  of  his  will  seemed 
to  be  breaking  down  before  a  flood  of  moral  lassi 
tude.  How  could  he  continue  to  play  his  part,  how 
keep  his  front  to  the  enemy,  with  this  poison  of  in 
difference  stealing  through  his  veins  ?  He  tried  to 
brace  himself  with  the  remembrance  of  his  wife's 
scorn.  He  had  not  forgotten  the  note  on  which  their 
conversation  had  closed.  If  he  had  ever  wondered 
how  she  would  receive  the  truth  he  wondered  no 
[102] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

longer — she  would  despise  him.  But  this  lent  a  new 
insidiousness  to  his  temptation,  since  her  contempt 
would  be  a  refuge  from  his  own.  He  said  to  himself 
that,  since  he  no  longer  cared  for  the  consequences, 
he  could  at  least  acquit  himself  of  speaking  in  self- 
defence.  What  he  wanted  now  was  not  immunity 
but  castigation :  his  wife's  indignation  might  still 
reconcile  him  to  himself.  Therein  lay  his  one  hope 
of  regeneration ;  her  scorn  was  the  moral  antiseptic 
that  he  needed,  her  comprehension  the  one  balm 
that  could  heal  him.  .  .  . 

When  they  left  the  dinner  he  was  so  afraid  of 
speaking  that  he  let  her  drive  home  alone,  and  went 
to  the  club  with  Flamel. 


[103] 


IX 

HE  rose  next  morning  with  the  resolve  to  know 
what  Alexa  thought  of  him.  It  was  not  an 
choring  in  a  haven  but  lying  to  in  a  storm — he 
felt  the  need  of  a  temporary  lull  in  the  turmoil  of 
his  sensations. 

He  came  home  late,  for  they  were  dining  alone 
and  he  knew  that  they  would  have  the  evening  to 
gether.  When  he  followed  her  to  the  drawing-room 
after  dinner  he  thought  himself  on  the  point  of 
speaking;  but  as  she  handed  him  his  coffee  he  said 
involuntarily:  "  I  shall  have  to  carry  this  off  to  the 
study;  I  Ve  got  a  lot  of  work  to-night." 

Alone  in  the  study  he  cursed  his  cowardice.  What 
was  it  that  had  withheld  him?  A  certain  bright 
unapproachableness  seemed  to  keep  him  at  arm's 
length.  She  was  not  the  kind  of  woman  whose  com 
passion  could  be  circumvented ;  there  was  no  chance 
of  slipping  past  the  outposts — he  would  never  take 
her  by  surprise.  Well — why  not  face  her,  then  ? 
What  he  shrank  from  could  be  no  worse  than  what 
he  was  enduring.  He  had  pushed  back  his  chair  and 
[104] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

turned  to  go  upstairs  when  a  new  expedient  pre 
sented  itself.  What  if,  instead  of  telling  her,  he  were 
to  let  her  find  out  for  herself  and  watch  the  effect 
of  the  discovery  before  speaking?  In  this  way  he 
made  over  to  chance  the  burden  of  the  revelation. 

The  idea  had  been  suggested  by  the  sight  of  the 
formula  enclosing  the  publisher's  check.  He  had 
deposited  the  money,  but  the  notice  accompanying 
it  dropped  from  his  note-case  as  he  cleared  his  table 
for  work.  It  was  the  formula  usual  in  such  cases,  and 
revealed  clearly  enough  that  he  was  the  recipient  of 
a  royalty  on  Margaret  Aubyn's  letters.  It  would  be 
impossible  for  Alexa  to  read  it  without  understand 
ing  at  once  that  the  letters  had  been  written  to  him 
and  that  he  had  sold  them.  .  .  . 

He  sat  downstairs  till  he  heard  her  ring  for  the 
parlor-maid  to  put  out  the  lights ;  then  he  went  up 
to  the  drawing-room  with  a  bundle  of  papers  in  his 
hand.  Alexa  was  just  rising  from  her  seat,  and  the 
lamplight  fell  on  the  deep  roll  of  hair  that  overhung 
her  brow  like  the  eaves  of  a  temple.  Her  face  had 
often  the  high  secluded  look  of  a  shrine ;  and  it  was 
[  103  ] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

this  touch  of  awe  in  her  beauty  that  now  made  him 
feel  himself  on  the  brink  of  sacrilege. 

Lest  the  feeling  should  control  him,  he  spoke  at 
once.  "I've  brought  you  a  piece  of  work — a  lot  of 
old  bills  and  things  that  I  want  you  to  sort  for  me. 
Some  are  not  worth  keeping — but  you  '11  be  able  to 
judge  of  that.  There  may  be  a  letter  or  two  among 
them — nothing  of  much  account;  but  I  don't  like 
to  throw  away  the  whole  lot  without  having  them 
looked  over,  and  I  have  n't  time  to  do  it  myself." 

He  held  out  the  papers,  and  she  took  them  with 
a  smile  that  seemed  to  recognize  in  the  service  he 
asked  the  tacit  intention  of  making  amends  for  the 
incident  of  the  previous  day. 

"  Are  you  sure  I  shall  know  which  to  keep  ?  " 

"Oh,  quite  sure,"  he  answered  easily;  "and  be 
sides,  none  are  of  much  importance." 

The  next  morning  he  invented  an  excuse  for  leav 
ing  the  house  without  seeing  her,  and  when  he  re 
turned,  just  before  dinner,  he  found  a  visitor's  hat 
and  stick  in  the  hall.  The  visitor  was  Flamel,  who 
was  just  taking  leave. 

[106] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

He  had  risen,  but  Alexa  remained  seated;  and 
their  attitude  gave  the  impression  of  a  colloquy  that 
had  prolonged  itself  beyond  the  limits  of  speech. 
Both  turned  a  surprised  eye  on  Glennard,  and  he  had 
the  sense  of  walking  into  a  room  grown  suddenly 
i  empty,  as  though  their  thoughts  were  conspirators 
dispersed  by  his  approach.  He  felt  the  clutch  of  his 
old  fear.  What  if  his  wife  had  already  sorted  the 
papers  and  had  told  Flamel  of  her  discovery  ?  Well, 
it  was  no  news  to  Flamel  that  Glennard  was  in  re 
ceipt  of  a  royalty  on  the  Aubyn  Letters.  .  . 

A  sudden  resolve  to  know  the  worst  made  him  lift 
his  eyes  to  his  wife  as  the  door  closed  on  Flamel. 
But  Alexa  had  risen  also,  and  bending  over  her 
|  writing-table,  with  her  back  to  Glennard,  was  be 
ginning  to  speak  precipitately. 

"  I  'm  dining  out  to-night — you  don't  mind  my 
deserting  you  ?  Julia  Armiger  sent  me  word  just  now 
that  she  had  an  extra  ticket  for  the  last  Ambrose 
concert.  She  told  me  to  say  how  sorry  she  was 
that  she  hadn't  two,  but  I  knew  you  wouldn't 
be  sorry ! "  She  ended  with  a  laugh  that  had  the 
[107] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

effect  of  being  a  strayed  echo  of  Mrs.  Armiger's; 
and  before  Glennard  could  speak  she  had  added, 
with  her  hand  on  the  door,  "  Mr.  Flamel  stayed  so 
late  that  I  Ve  hardly  time  to  dress.  The  concert  be 
gins  ridiculously  early,  and  Julia  dines  at  half-past 
seven.1' 

Glennard  stood  alone  in  the  empty  room  that 
seemed  somehow  full  of  an  ironical  consciousness  of 
what  was  happening.  "  She  hates  me,"  he  murmured. 
"  She  hates  me  ..." 

The  next  day  was  Sunday,  and  Glennard  pur 
posely  lingered  late  in  his  room.  When  he  came 
downstairs  his  wife  was  already  seated  at  the  break 
fast-table.  She  lifted  her  usual  smile  to  his  entrance 
and  they  took  shelter  in  the  nearest  topic,  like  way 
farers  overtaken  by  a  storm.  While  he  listened  to 
her  account  of  the  concert  he  began  to  think  that, 
after  all,  she  had  not  yet  sorted  the  papers,  and  that 
her  agitation  of  the  previous  day  must  be  ascribed 
to  another  cause,  in  which  perhaps  he  had  but  an 
indirect  concern.  He  wondered  it  had  never  before 
[108] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

occurred  to  him  that  Flamel  was  the  kind  of  man 
who  might  very  well  please  a  woman  at  his  own  ex 
pense,  without  need  of  fortuitous  assistance.  If  this 
possibility  cleared  the  outlook  it  did  not  brighten  it. 
Glennard  merely  felt  himself  left  alone  with  his  base 
ness. 

Alexa  left  the  breakfast-table  before  him,  and 
when  he  went  up  to  the  drawing-room  he  found  her 
dressed  to  go  out. 

"  Are  n't  you  a  little  early  for  church  ?  "  he  asked. 

She  replied  that,  on  the  way  there,  she  meant  to 
stop  a  moment  at  her  mother's ;  and  while  she  drew 
on  her  gloves  he  fumbled  among  the  knick-knacks  on 
the  mantelpiece  for  a  match  to  light  his  cigarette. 

"Well,  good-bye,*"  she  said,  turning  to  go;  and 
from  the  threshold  she  added :  "  By  the  way,  I  Ve 
sorted  the  papers  you  gave  me.  Those  that  I  thought 
you  would  like  to  keep  are  on  your  study  table."  She 
went  downstairs  and  he  heard  the  door  close  behind 
her. 

She  had  sorted  the  papers — she  knew,  then — she 
must  know — and  she  had  made  no  sign  ! 
[109] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

Glennard,  he  hardly  knew  how,  found  himself  once 
more  in  the  study.  On  the  table  lay  the  packet  he 
had  given  her.  It  was  much  smaller — she  had  evi 
dently  gone  over  the  papers  with  care,  destroying 
the  greater  number.  He  loosened  the  elastic  band 
and  spread  the  remaining  envelopes  on  his  desk.  The 
publisher's  notice  was  among  them. 


[no] 


HIS  wife  knew  and  she  made  no  sign.  Glennard 
found  himself  in  the  case  of  the  seafarer  who, 
closing  his  eyes  at  nightfall  on  a  scene  he  thinks  to  put 
leagues  behind  him  before  day,  wakes  to  a  port-hole 
framing  the  same  patch  of  shore.  From  the  kind  of  ex 
altation  to  which  his  resolve  had  lifted  him  he  dropped 
to  an  unreasoning  apathy.  His  impulse  of  confession 
had  acted  as  a  drug  to  self-reproach.  He  had  tried  to 
shift  a  portion  of  his  burden  to  his  wife's  shoulders ; 
and  now  that  she  had  tacitly  refused  to  carry  it,  he 
felt  the  load  too  heavy  to  be  taken  up. 

A  fortunate  interval  of  hard  work  brought  respite 
from  this  phase  of  sterile  misery.  He  went  West  to 
argue  an  important  case,  won  it,  and  came  back  to 
fresh  preoccupations.  His  QWJOL  ^affairs  were  thriving 
enough  to  engross  him  in  the  pauses  of  his  profes 
sional  work,  and  for  over  two  months  he  had  little 
time  to  look  himself  in  the  face.  Not  unnaturally — 
for  he  was  as  yet  unskilled  in  the  subtleties  of  intro 
spection — he  mistook  his  temporary  insensibility  for 
a  gradual  revival  of  moral  health. 

[in] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

He  told  himself  that  he  was  recovering  his  sense 
of  proportion,  getting  to  see  things  in  their  true 
light ;  and  if  he  now  thought  of  his  rash  appeal  to 
his  wife's  sympathy  it  was  as  an  act  of  folly  from 
the  consequences  of  which  he  had  been  saved  by  the 
providence  that  watches  over  madmen.  He  had  little 
leisure  to  observe  Alexa ;  but  he  concluded  that  the 
common  sense  momentarily  denied  him  had  coun 
selled  her  silent  acceptance  of  the  inevitable.  If 
such  a  quality  was  a  poor  substitute  for  the  passion 
ate  justness  that  had  once  seemed  to  distinguish 
her,  he  accepted  the  alternative  as  a  part  of  that 
general  lowering  of  the  key  that  seems  needful  to 
the  maintenance  of  the  matrimonial  duet.  What 
woman  ever  retained  her  abstract  sense  of  justice 
where  another  woman  was  concerned  ?  Possibly  the 
thought  that  he  had  profited  by  Mrs.  Aubyn's  ten 
derness  was  not  wholly  disagreeable  to  his  wife. 

When  the  pressure  of  work  began  to  lessen,  and 

he  found  himself,  in  the  lengthening  afternoons,  able 

to  reach  home  somewhat  earlier,  he  noticed  that  the 

little  drawing-room  was  always  full  and  that  he  and 

[112] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

his  wife  seldom  had  an  evening  alone  together. 
When  he  was  tired,  as  often  happened,  she  went 
out  alone ;  the  idea  of  giving  up  an  engagement  to 
remain  with  him  seemed  not  to  occur  to  her.  She 
had  shown,  as  a  girl,  little  fondness  for  society,  nor 
had  she  seemed  to  regret  it  during  the  year  they  had 
spent  in  the  country.  He  reflected,  however,  that  he 
was  sharing  the  common  lot  of  husbands,  who  pro 
verbially  mistake  the  early  ardors  of  housekeeping 
for  a  sign  of  settled  domesticity.  Alexa,  at  any  rate, 
was  refuting  his  theory  as  inconsiderately  as  a  seed 
ling  defeats  the  gardener^  expectations.  An  undefi- 
nable  change  had  come  over  her.  In  one  sense  it  was 
a  happy  one,  since  she  had  grown,  if  not  handsomer, 
at  least  more  vivid  and  expressive ;  her  beauty  had 
become  more  communicable :  it  was  as  though  she 
had  learned  the  conscious  exercise  of  intuitive  attri 
butes  and  now  used  her  effects  with  the  discrimina 
tion  of  an  artist  skilled  in  values.  To  a  dispassionate 
critic  (as  Glennard  now  rated  himself)  the  art  may 
at  times  have  been  a  little  too  obvious.  Her  attempts 
at  lightness  lacked  spontaneity,  and  she  sometimes 
[113] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

rasped  him  by  laughing  like  Julia  Armiger ;  but  he 
had  enough  imagination  to  perceive  that,  in  respect 
of  his  wife's  social  arts,  a  husband  necessarily  sees 
the  wrong  side  of  the  tapestry. 

In  this  ironical  estimate  of  their  relation  Glen- 
nard  found  himself  strangely  relieved  of  all  concern 
as  to  his  wife's  feelings  for  Flamel.  From  an  Olym 
pian  pinnacle  of  indifference  he  calmly  surveyed  their 
inoffensive  antics.  It  was  surprising  how  his  cheap 
ening  of  his  wife  put  him  at  ease  with  himself.  Far 
as  he  and  she  were  from  each  other  they  yet  had,  in 
a  sense,  the  tacit  nearness  of  complicity.  Yes,  they 
were  accomplices;  he  could  no  more  be  jealous  of 
her  than  she  could  despise  him.  The  jealousy  that 
— I  would  once  have  seemed  a  blur  on  her  whiteness 
now  appeared  like  a  tribute  to  ideals  in  which  he 
no  longer  believed. 

Glennard  was  little  given  to  exploring  the  outskirts 
of  literature.  He  always  skipped  the  "  literary  notices" 
in  the  papers,  and  he  had  small  leisure  for  the  inter 
mittent  pleasures  of  the  periodical.  He  had  therefore 
[114] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

no  notion  of  the  prolonged  reverberations  which  the 
Aubyn  Letters  had  awakened.  When  the  book  ceased 
to  be  talked  about  he  supposed  it  had  ceased  to  be 
read ;  and  this  apparent  subsidence  of  the  agitation 
about  it  brought  the  reassuring  sense  that  he  had 
exaggerated  its  vitality.  The  conviction,  if  it  did 
not  ease  his  conscience,  at  least  offered  him  the 
relative  relief  of  obscurity ;  he  felt  like  an  offender 
taken  down  from  the  pillory  and  thrust  into  the 
soothing  darkness  of  a  cell. 

But  one  evening,  when  Alexa  had  left  him  to  go 
to  a  dance,  he  chanced  to  turn  over  the  magazines 
on  her  table,  and  the  copy  of  the  Horoscope  to 
which  he  settled  down  with  his  cigar  confronted 
him,  on  its  first  page,  with  a  portrait  of  Margaret 
Aubyn.  It  was  a  reproduction  of  the  photograph 
that  had  stood  so  long  on  his  desk.  The  desiccating 
air  of  memory  had  turned  her  into  the  mere  abstrac 
tion  of  a  woman,  and  this  unexpected  evocation 
seemed  to  bring  her  nearer  than  she  had  ever  been 
in  life.  Was  it  because  he  understood  her  better? 
He  looked  long  into  her  eyes;  little  personal  traits 
[115] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

reached  out  to  him  like  caresses — the  tired  droop 
of  her  lids,  her  quick  way  of  leaning  forward  as  she 
spoke,  the  movements  of  her  long  expressive  hands. 
All  that  was  feminine  in  her,  the  quality  he  had 
always  missed,  stole  toward  him  from  her  unre- 
proachful  gaze ;  and  now  that  it  was  too  late,  life 
had  developed  in  him  the  subtler  perceptions  which 
could  detect  it  in  even  this  poor  semblance  of  her 
self.  For  a  moment  he  found  consolation  in  the 
thought  that,  at  any  cost,  they  had  thus  been 
brought  together;  then  a  sense  of  shame  rushed 
over  him.  Face  to  face  with  her,  he  felt  himself  laid 
bare  to  the  inmost  fold  of  consciousness.  The  shame 
was  deep,  but  it  was  a  renovating  anguish :  he  was 
like  a  man  whom  intolerable  pain  has  roused  from 
the  creeping  lethargy  of  death.  .  . 

He  rose  next  morning  to  as  fresh  a  sense  of  life 
as  though  his  hour  of  communion  with  Margaret 
Aubyn  had  been  a  more  exquisite  renewal  of  their 
earlier  meetings.  His  waking  thought  was  that  he 
must  see  her  again;  and  as  consciousness  affirmed 
itself  he  felt  an  intense  fear  of  losing  the  sense  of 
[116] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

her  nearness.  But  she  was  still  close  to  him :  her 
presence  remained  the  one  reality  in  a  world  of 
shadows.  All  through  his  working  hours  he  was  re 
living  with  incredible  minuteness  every  incident  of 
their  obliterated  past :  as  a  man  who  has  mastered 
the  spirit  of  a  foreign  tongue  turns  with  renewed 
wonder  to  the  pages  his  youth  has  plodded  over. 
In  this  lucidity  of  retrospection  the  most  trivial  de 
tail  had  its  meaning,  and  the  joy  of  recovery  was 
embittered  to  Glennard  by  the  perception  of  all  that 
he  had  missed.  He  had  been  pitiably,  grotesquely 
stupid;  and  there  was  irony  in  the  thought  that, 
but  for  the  crisis  through  which  he  was  passing,  he 
might  have  lived  on  in  complacent  ignorance  of  his 
loss.  It  was  as  though  she  had  bought  him  with  her 
blood.  .  . 

That  evening  he  and  Alexa  dined  alone.  After 
dinner  he  followed  her  to  the  drawing-room.  He  no 
longer  felt  the  need  of  avoiding  her ;  he  was  hardly 
conscious  of  her  presence.  After  a  few  words  they 
lapsed  into  silence,  and  he  sat  smoking  with  his  eyes 
[117] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

on  the  fire.  It  was  not  that  he  was  unwilling  to  talk 
to  her ;  he  felt  a  curious  desire  to  be  as  kind  as  possi 
ble  ;  but  he  was  always  forgetting  that  she  was  there. 
Her  full  bright  presence,  through  which  the  currents 
of  life  flowed  so  warmly,  had  grown  as  tenuous  as  a 
shadow,  and  he  saw  so  far  beyond  her. 

Presently  she  rose  and  began  to  move  about  the 
room.  She  seemed  to  be  looking  for  something,  and 
he  roused  himself  to  ask  what  she  wanted. 

"  Only  the  last  number  of  the  Horoscope.  I  thought 
I'd  left  it  on  this  table."  He  said  nothing,  and  she 
went  on :  "  You  have  n't  seen  it  ?  " 

"No,"  he  returned  coldly.  The  magazine  was 
locked  in  his  desk. 

His  wife  had  moved  to  the  mantelpiece.  She  stood 
facing  him,  and  as  he  looked  up  he  met  her  tentative 
gaze.  "  I  was  reading  an  article  in  it — a  review  of 
Mrs.  Aubyn's  Letters?  she  added  slowly,  with  her 
deep  deliberate  blush. 

Glennard  stooped  to  toss  his  cigar  into  the  fire. 
He  felt  a  savage  wish  that  she  would  not  speak  the 
other  woman's  name ;  nothing  else  seemed  to  matter. 
[118] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

"  You  seem  to  do  a  lot  of  reading,"  he  said. 

She  still  confronted  him.  "  I  was  keeping  this  for 
you — I  thought  it  might  interest  you,"  she  said 
with  an  air  of  gentle  insistence. 

He  stood  up  and  turned  away.  He  was  sure  she 
knew  that  he  had  taken  the  review,  and  he  felt  that 
he  was  beginning  to  hate  her  again. 

"I  haven't  time  for  such  things,"  he  said  indif 
ferently.  As  he  moved  to  the  door  he  heard  her  take 
a  hurried  step  forward;  then  she  paused,  and  sank 
without  speaking  into  the  chair  from  which  he  had 
risen. 


XI 

AS  Glennard,  in  the  raw  February  sunlight, 
-/.  X  mounted  the  road  to  the  cemetery,  he  felt 
the  beatitude  that  comes  with  an  abrupt  cessation 
of  physical  pain.  He  had  reached  the  point  where 
self-analysis  ceases ;  the  impulse  that  moved  him  was 
purely  intuitive.  He  did  not  even  seek  a  reason  for 
it,  beyond  the  obvious  one  that  his  desire  to  stand 
by  Margaret  Aubyn's  grave  was  prompted  by  no  at 
tempt  at  a  sentimental  reparation,  but  rather  by  the 
need  to  affirm  in  some  way  the  reality  of  the  tie  be 
tween  them. 

The  ironical  promiscuity  of  death  had  brought 
Mrs.  Aubyn  back  to  share  the  hospitality  of  her 
husband^s  last  lodging;  but  though  Glennard  knew 
she  had  been  buried  near  New  York  he  had  never 
visited  her  grave.  He  was  oppressed,  as  he  now 
threaded  the  long  avenues,  by  a  chilling  vision  of 
her  return.  There  was  no  family  to  follow  her  hearse ; 
she  had  died  alone,  as  she  had  lived ;  and  the  "  dis 
tinguished  mourners  "  who  had  formed  the  escort  of 
the  famous  writer  knew  nothing  of  the  woman  they 
[  120] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

were  committing  to  the  grave.  Glennard  could  not 
even  remember  at  what  season  she  had  been  buried ; 
t  but  his  mood  indulged  the  fancy  that  it  must  have 
been  on  some  such  day  of  harsh  sunlight,  the  incisive 
February  brightness  that  gives  perspicuity  without 
warmth.  The  white  avenues  stretched  before  him  in 
terminably,  lined  with  stereotyped  emblems  of  afflic 
tion,  as  though  all  the  platitudes  ever  uttered  had 
been  turned  to  marble  and  set  up  over  the  unresist 
ing  dead.  Here  and  there,  no  doubt,  a  frigid  urn  or 
an  insipid  angel  imprisoned  some  fine-fibred  grief,  as 
the  most  hackneyed  words  may  become  the  vehicle 
of  rare  meanings ;  but  for  the  most  part  the  endless 
alignment  of  monuments  seemed  to  embody  those 
easy  generalizations  about  death  that  do  not  disturb 
the  repose  of  the  living.  Glennard's  eye,  as  he  fol 
lowed  the  way  pointed  out  to  him,  had  instinctively 
sought  some  low  mound  with  a  quiet  headstone.  He 
had  forgotten  that  the  dead  seldom  plan  their  own 
houses,  and  with  a  pang  he  discovered  the  name  he 
sought  on  the  cyclopean  base  of  a  shaft  rearing  its 
aggressive  height  at  the  angle  of  two  avenues. 
[121] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"  How  she  would  have  hated  it ! "  he  murmured. 

A  bench  stood  near  and  he  seated  himself.  The 
monument  rose  before  him  like  some  pretentious  un 
inhabited  dwelling:  he  could  not  believe  that  Mar 
garet  Aubyn  lay  there.  It  was  a  Sunday  morning,  and 
black  figures  moved  among  the  paths,  placing  flow 
ers  on  the  frost-bound  hillocks.  Glennard  noticed  that 
the  neighboring  graves  had  been  thus  newly  dressed, 
and  he  fancied  a  blind  stir  of  expectancy  through 
the  sod,  as  though  the  bare  mounds  spread  a  parched 
surface  to  that  commemorative  rain.  He  rose  pres 
ently  and  walked  back  to  the  entrance  of  the  ceme 
tery.  Several  greenhouses  stood  near  the  gates,  and 
turning  in  at  the  first  he  asked  for  some  flowers. 

"Anything  in  the  emblematic  line?"  asked  the 
anaemic  man  behind  the  dripping  counter. 

Glennard  shook  his  head. 

"Just  cut  flowers?  This  way  then."  The  florist 
unlocked  a  glass  door  and  led  him  down  a  moist 
green  aisle.  The  hot  air  was  choked  with  the  scent 
of  white  azaleas,  white  lilies,  white  lilacs;  all  the 
flowers  were  white :  they  were  like  a  prolongation, 
[122] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

a  mystic  efflorescence,  of  the  long  rows  of  marble 
tombstones,  and  their  perfume  seemed  to  cover  an 
odor  of  decay.  The  rich  atmosphere  made  Glennard 
dizzy.  As  he  leaned  in  the  doorway,  waiting  for  the 
flowers,  he  had  a  penetrating  sense  of  Margaret 
Aubyn's  nearness — not  the  imponderable  presence 
of  his  inner  vision,  but  a  life  that  beat  warm  in  his 
arms.  .  . 

The  sharp  air  caught  him  as  he  stepped  out  into 
it  again.  He  walked  back  and  scattered  the  flowers 
over  the  grave.  The  edges  of  the  white  petals  shriv 
elled  like  burnt  paper  in  the  cold ;  and  as  he  watched 
them  the  illusion  of  her  nearness  faded,  shrank  back 
frozen. 


[123] 


XII 

motive  of  his  visit  to  the  cemetery  re- 
A  mained  undefined  save  as  a  final  effort  of 
escape  from  his  wife's  inexpressive  acceptance  of  his 
shame.  It  seemed  to  him  that  as  long  as  he  could 
keep  himself  alive  to  that  shame  he  would  not 
wholly  have  succumbed  to  its  consequences.  His 
chief  fear  was  that  he  should  become  the  creature 
of  his  act.  His  wife's  indifference  degraded  him :  it 
seemed  to  put  him  on  a  level  with  his  dishonor. 
Margaret  Aubyn  would  have  abhorred  the  deed  in 
proportion  to  her  pity  for  the  man.  The  sense  of 
her  potential  pity  drew  him  back  to  her.  The  one 
woman  knew  but  did  not  understand;  the  other,  it 
sometimes  seemed,  understood  without  knowing. 

In  its  last  disguise  of  retrospective  remorse,  his 
self-pity  affected  a  desire  for  solitude  and  medita 
tion.  He  lost  himself  in  morbid  musings,  in  futile 
visions  of  what  life  with  Margaret  Aubyn  might 
have  been.  There  were  moments  when,  in  the  strange 
dislocation  of  his  view,  the  wrong  he  had  done  her 
seemed  a  tie  between  them. 

[124] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

To  indulge  these  emotions  he  fell  into  the  habit, 
on  Sunday  afternoons,  of  solitary  walks  prolonged 
till  after  dusk.  The  days  were  lengthening,  there  was 
a  touch  of  spring  in  the  air,  and  his  wanderings  now 
usually  led  him  to  the  Park  and  its  outlying  regions. 

One  Sunday,  tired  of  aimless  locomotion,  he  took 
a  cab  at  the  Park  gates  and  let  it  carry  him  out  to 
the  Riverside  Drive.  It  was  a  gray  afternoon  streaked 
with  east  wind.  Glennard's  cab  advanced  slowly,  and 
as  he  leaned  back,  gazing  with  absent  intentness  at 
the  deserted  paths  that  wound  under  bare  boughs 
between  grass  banks  of  premature  vividness,  his  at 
tention  was  arrested  by  two  figures  walking  ahead 
of  him.  This  couple,  who  had  the  path  to  them 
selves,  moved  at  an  uneven  pace,  as  though  adapting 
their  gait  to  a  conversation  marked  by  meditative 
intervals.  Now  and  then  they  paused,  and  in  one  of 
these  pauses  the  lady,  turning  toward  her  compan 
ion,  showed  Glennard  the  outline  of  his  wife's  pro 
file.  The  man  was  Flamel. 

The  blood  rushed  to  Glennard's  forehead.  He  sat 
up  with  a  jerk  and  pushed  back  the  lid  in  the  roof 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

of  the  hansom ;  but  when  the  cabman  bent  down  he 
dropped  into  his  seat  without  speaking.  Then,  be 
coming  conscious  of  the  prolonged  interrogation  of 
the  lifted  lid,  he  called  out — "  Turn — drive  back — 
anywhere — I  'm  in  a  hurry — " 

As  the  cab  swung  round  he  caught  a  last  glimpse 
of  the  two  figures.  They  had  not  moved ;  Alexa,  with 
bent  head,  stood  listening. 

"  My  God,  my  God — "  he  groaned. 

It  was  hideous — it  was  abominable — he  could  not 
understand  it.  The  woman  was  nothing  to  him — less 
than  nothing — yet  the  blood  hummed  in  his  ears 
and  hung  a  cloud  before  him.  He  knew  it  was  only 
the  stirring  of  the  primal  instinct,  that  it  had  no 
more  to  do  with  his  reasoning  self  than  any  reflex 
impulse  of  the  body;  but  that  merely  lowered  an 
guish  to  disgust.  Yes,  it  was  disgust  he  felt — almost 
a  physical  nausea.  The  poisonous  fumes  of  life  were 
in  his  lungs.  He  was  sick,  unutterably  sick.  .  . 

He  drove  home  and  went  to  his  room.  They  were 
giving  a  little  dinner  that  night,  and  when  he  came 
down  the  guests  were  arriving.   He  looked  at  his 
[126] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

wife:  her  beauty  was  extraordinary,  but  it  seemed 
to  him  the  beauty  of  a  smooth  sea  along  an  unlit 
coast.  She  frightened  him. 

He  sat  late  in  his  study.  He  heard  the  parlor 
maid  lock  the  front  door;  then  his  wife  went  up 
stairs  and  the  lights  were  put  out.  His  brain  was 
like  some  great  empty  hall  with  an  echo  in  it :  one 
thought  reverberated  endlessly.  .  .  At  length  he 
drew  his  chair  to  the  table  and  began  to  write.  He 
addressed  an  envelope  and  then  slowly  re-read  what 
he  had  written. 
"  My  dear  Flamel, 

"  Many  apologies  far  not  sending  you  sooner  the 
"  enclosed  check^  which  represents  the  customary  per- 
"  centage  on  the  sale  of  the  'Letters? 

"  Trusting  you  will  excuse  the  oversight, 
"  Yours  truly 

"  Stephen  Glennard.^ 

He  let  himself  out  of  the  darkened  house  and 
dropped  the  letter  in  the  post-box  at  the  corner. 

The  next  afternoon  he  was  detained  late  at  his 
[127] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

office,  and  as  he  was  preparing  to  leave  he  heard 
some  one  asking  for  him  in  the  outer  room.  He 
seated  himself  again  and  Flamel  was  shown  in. 

The  two  men,  as  Glennard  pushed  aside  an  ob 
structive  chair,  had  a  moment  to  measure  each 
other;  then  Flamel  advanced,  and  drawing  out  his 
note-case,  laid  a  slip  of  paper  on  the  desk. 

"  My  dear  fellow,  what  on  earth  does  this  mean  ?  " 

Glennard  recognized  his  check. 

"That  I  was  remiss,  simply.  It  ought  to  have 
gone  to  you  before.1' 

FlameFs  tone  had  been  that  of  unaffected  surprise, 
but  at  this  his  accent  changed  and  he  asked  quickly : 
"On  what  ground?" 

Glennard  had  moved  away  from  the  desk  and 
stood  leaning  against  the  calf-backed  volumes  of 
the  bookcase.  "  On  the  ground  that  you  sold  Mrs. 
Aubyn's  letters  for  me,  and  that  I  find  the  inter 
mediary  in  such  cases  is  entitled  to  a  percentage  on 
the  sale." 

Flamel  paused  before  answering.  "You  find,  you 
say.  It 's  a  recent  discovery  ?  " 
[128] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"Obviously,  from  my  not  sending  the  check 
sooner.  You  see  I'm  new  to  the  business." 

"  And  since  when  have  you  discovered  that  there 
was  any  question  of  business,  as  far  as  I  was  con 
cerned?" 

Glennard  flushed  and  his  voice  rose  slightly.  "  Are 
you  reproaching  me  for  not  having  remembered  it 
sooner  ?  " 

Flamel,  who  had  spoken  in  the  rapid  repressed 
tone  of  a  man  on  the  verge  of  anger,  stared  a  mo 
ment  at  this  and  then,  in  his  natural  voice,  rejoined 
good-humoredly,  "  Upon  my  soul,  I  don't  understand 
you!" 

The  change  of  key  seemed  to  disconcert  Glennard. 
"  It 's  simple  enough,"  he  muttered. 

"  Simple  enough — your  offering  me  money  in  re 
turn  for  a  friendly  service  ?  I  don't  know  what  your 
other  friends  expect ! " 

"Some  of  my  friends  wouldn't  have  undertaken 
the  job.  Those  who  would  have  done  so  would  prob 
ably  have  expected  to  be  paid." 

He  lifted  his  eyes  to  Flamel  and  the  two  men 
[129] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

looked  at  each  other.  Flamel  had  turned  white  and 
his  lips  stirred,  but  he  held  his  temperate  note.  "  If 
you  mean  to  imply  that  the  job  was  not  a  nice  one 
you  lay  yourself  open  to  the  retort  that  you  pro 
posed  it.  But  for  my  part  I've  never  seen,  I  never 
shall  see,  any  reason  for  not  publishing  the  letters." 

"That's  just  it!" 

"What—?" 

"  The  certainty  of  your  not  seeing  was  what  made 
me  go  to  you.  When  a  man's  got  stolen  goods  to 
pawn  he  does  n't  take  them  to  the  police-station." 

"Stolen?"  Flamel  echoed.  "The  letters  were 
stolen?" 

Glennard  burst  into  a  laugh.  "  How  much  longer 
do  you  expect  me  to  keep  up  that  pretence  about 
the  letters  ?  You  knew  well  enough  they  were  writ 
ten  to  me." 

Flamel  looked  at  him  in  silence.  "Were  they?" 
he  said  at  length.  "  I  did  n't  know  it." 

"And  didn't  suspect  it,  I  suppose,"  Glennard 
sneered. 

The  other  was  again  silent ;  then  he  said,  "  I  may 
[130] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

remind  you  that,  supposing  I  had  felt  any  curiosity 
about  the  matter,  I  had  no  way  of  finding  out  that 
the  letters  were  written  to  you.  You  never  showed 
me  the  originals." 

"  What  does  that  prove  ?  There  were  fifty  ways  of 
finding  out.  It 's  the  kind  of  thing  one  can  easily  do." 

Flamel  glanced  at  him  with  contempt.  "  Our  ideas 
probably  differ  as  to  what  a  man  can  easily  do.  It 
would  not  have  been  easy  for  me." 

Glennard's  anger  vented  itself  in  the  words  upper 
most  in  his  thought.  "  It  may,  then,  interest  you  to 
hear  that  my  wife  does  know  about  the  letters — has 
known  for  some  months.  .  ." 

"  Ah,"  said  the  other,  slowly. 

Glennard  saw  that,  in  his  blind  clutch  at  a  wea 
pon,  he  had  seized  the  one  most  apt  to  wound. 
FlameFs  muscles  were  under  control,  but  his  face 
showed  the  undefinable  change  produced  by  the 
slow  infiltration  of  poison.  Every  implication  that 
the  words  contained  had  reached  its  mark;  but 
Glennard  felt  that  their  obvious  intent  was  lost  in 
the  anguish  of  what  they  suggested.  He  was  sure 
[131] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

now  that  Flamel  would  never  have  betrayed  him; 
but  the  inference  only  made  a  wider  outlet  for  his 
anger.  He  paused  breathlessly  for  Flamel  to  speak. 

"  If  she  knows,  it 's  not  through  me."  It  was  what 
Glennard  had  waited  for. 

"  Through  you,  by  God  ?  Who  said  it  was  through 
you?  Do  you  suppose  I  leave  it  to  you,  or  to  any 
body  else,  for  that  matter,  to  keep  my  wife  informed 
of  my  actions  ?  I  did  n't  suppose  even  such  egregious 
conceit  as  yours  could  delude  a  man  to  that  degree  ! " 
Struggling  for  a  foothold  in  the  landslide  of  his 
dignity,  he  added  in  a  steadier  tone,  "My  wife 
learned  the  facts  from  me."" 

Flamel  received  this  in  silence.  The  other's  out 
break  seemed  to  have  restored  his  self-control,  and 
when  he  spoke  it  was  with  a  deliberation  implying 
that  his  course  was  chosen.  "In  that  case  I  under 
stand  still  less — " 

«  Still  less— ?" 

"  The  meaning  of  this."  He  pointed  to  the  check. 
"When  you  began  to  speak  I  supposed  you  had 
meant  it  as  a  bribe ;  now  I  can  only  infer  it  was  in- 
[188] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

tended  as  a  random  insult.  In  either  case,  here 's  my 
answer." 

He  tore  the  slip  of  paper  in  two  and  tossed  the 
fragments   across  the   desk  to  Glennard.  Then  he 

turned  and  walked  out  of  the  office. 

f 

Glennard  dropped  his  head  on  his  hands.  If  he  had  \  \ 
hoped  to  restore  his  self-respect  by  the  simple  expe 
dient  of  assailing  FlamePs,  the  result  had  not  justi 
fied  his  expectation.  The  blow  he  had  struck  had 
blunted  the  edge  of  his  anger,  and  the  unforeseen  ex 
tent  of  the  hurt  inflicted  did  not  alter  the  fact  that 
his  weapon  had  broken  in  his  hands.  He  now  saw 
that  his  rage  against  Flamel  was  only  the  last  pro 
jection  of  a  passionate  self-disgust.  This  conscious 
ness  did  not  dull  his  dislike  of  the  man ;  it  simply 
made  reprisals  ineffectual.  FlamePs  unwillingness  to 
quarrel  with  him  was  the  last  stage  of  his  abasement. 

In  the  light  of  this  final  humiliation  his  assump 
tion  of  his  wife's  indifference  struck  him  as  hardly  so 
fatuous  as  the  sentimental  resuscitation  of  his  past. 
He  had  been  living  in  a  factitious  world  wherein 
his  emotions  were  the  sycophants  of  his  vanity,  and 
[183] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

it  was  with  instinctive  relief  that  he  felt  its  ruins 
crash  about  his  head. 

It  was  nearly  dark  when  he  left  his  office,  and 
he  walked  slowly  homeward  in  the  complete  mental 
abeyance  that  follows  on  such  a  crisis.  He  was  not 
aware  that  he  was  thinking  of  his  wife ;  yet  when  he 
reached  his  own  door  he  found  that,  in  the  involun 
tary  readjustment  of  his  vision,  she  had  once  more 
become  the  central  point  of  consciousness. 


[18*  J 


XIII 

IT  had  never  before  occurred  to  him  that  she  might, 
after  all,  have  missed  the  purport  of  the  document 
he  had  put  in  her  way.  What  if,  in  her  hurried 
inspection  of  the  papers,  she  had  passed  it  over  as 
related  to  the  private  business  of  some  client  ?  What, 
for  instance,  was  to  prevent  her  concluding  that 
Glennard  was  the  counsel  of  the  unknown  person 
who  had  sold  the  Aubyn  Letters?  The  subject  was 
one  not  likely  to  fix  her  attention — she  was  not  a 
curious  woman. 

Glennard  at  this  point  laid  down  his  fork  and 
glanced  at  her  between  the  candle-shades.  The  alter 
native  explanation  of  her  indifference  was  not  slow 
in  presenting  itself.  Her  head  had  the  same  listening 
droop  as  when  he  had  caught  sight  of  her  the  day 
before  in  FlameFs  company ;  the  attitude  revived  the 
vividness  of  his  impression.  It  was  simple  enough, 
after  all.  She  had  ceased  to  care  for  him  because  she 
cared  for  some  one  else. 

As  he  followed  her  upstairs  he  felt  a  sudden  stir 
ring  of  his  dormant  anger.  His  sentiments  had  lost 
[135] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

their  artificial  complexity.  He  had  already  acquitted 
her  of  any  connivance  in  his  baseness,  and  he  felt 
only  that  he  loved  her  and  that  she  had  escaped 
him.  This  was  now,  strangely  enough,  his  dominant 
thought :  the  sense  that  he  and  she  had  passed 
through  the  fusion  of  love  and  had  emerged  from 
it  as  incommunicably  apart  as  though  the  transmu 
tation  had  never  taken  place.  Every  other  passion, 
he  mused,  left  some  mark  upon  the  nature ;  but  love 
passed  like  the  flight  of  a  ship  across  the  waters. 

She  dropped  into  her  usual  seat  near  the  lamp, 
and  he  leaned  against  the  chimney,  moving  about 
with  an  inattentive  hand  the  knick-knacks  on  the 
mantel. 

Suddenly  he  caught  sight  of  her  reflection  in  the 
mirror.  She  was  looking  at  him.  He  turned  and  their 
eyes  met. 
;    He  moved  across  the  room. 

"  There 's  something  that  I  want  to  say  to  you," 
he  began. 

She  held  his  gaze,  but  her  color  deepened.   He 
noticed  again,  with  a  jealous  pang,  how  her  beauty 
[136] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

had  gained  in  warmth  and  meaning.  It  was  as  though 
a  transparent  cup  had  been  filled  with  wine.  He 
looked  at  her  ironically. 

"I've  never  prevented  your  seeing  your  friends 
here,"  he  broke  out.  "  Why  do  you  meet  Flamel  in 
out-of-the-way  places  ?  Nothing  makes  a  woman  so 
cheap — " 

She  rose  abruptly  and  they  faced  each  other  a  few 
feet  apart. 

"  What  do  you  mean  ?  "  she  asked. 

"  I  saw  you  with  him  last  Sunday  on  the  River 
side  Drive,"  he  went  on,  the  utterance  of  the  charge 
reviving  his  anger. 

"Ah,"  she  murmured.  She  sank  into  her  chair 
again  and  began  to  play  with  a  paper-knife  that  lay 
on  the  table  at  her  elbow. 

Her  silence  exasperated  him. 

"Well?"  he  burst  out.  "Is  that  all  you  have  to 
say?" 

"  Do  you  wish  me  to  explain  ?  "  she  asked  proudly. 

"  Do  you  imply  I  have  n't  the  right  to  ?  " 

"I  imply  nothing.  I  will  tell  you  whatever  you 
[137] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

wish  to  know.  I  went  for  a  walk  with  Mr.  Flamel 
because  he  asked  me  to." 

"  I  did  n't  suppose  you  went  uninvited.  But  there 
are  certain  things  a  sensible  woman  does  n't  do.  She 
doesn't  slink  about  in  out-of-the-way  streets  with 
men.  Why  could  n't  you  have  seen  him  here  ?  " 

She  hesitated.  "Because  he  wanted  to  see  me  alone." 

"  Did  he  indeed  ?  And  may  I  ask  if  you  gratify 
all  his  wishes  with  equal  alacrity  ?  " 

"  I  don't  know  that  he  has  any  others  where  I  am 
concerned."  She  paused  again  and  then  continued,  in 
a  voice  that  somehow  had  an  under-note  of  warn 
ing,  "He  wished  to  bid  me  good-bye.  He's  going 
away." 

Glennard  turned  on  her  a  startled  glance.  "  Going 
away  ?  " 

"  He 's  going  to  Europe  to-morrow.  He  goes  for  a 
long  time.  I  supposed  you  knew." 

The  last  phrase  revived  his  irritation.  "You  for 
get  that  I  depend  on  you  for  my  information  about 
Flamel.  He 's  your  friend  and  not  mine.  In  fact,  I  've 
sometimes  wondered  at  your  going  out  of  your  way 
[138] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

to  be  so  civil  to  him  when  you  must  see  plainly 
enough  that  I  don't  like  him." 

Her  answer  to  this  was  not  immediate.  She  seemed 
to  be  choosing  her  words  with  care,  not  so  much  for 
her  own  sake  as  for  his,  and  his  exasperation  was  in 
creased  by  the  suspicion  that  she  was  trying  to  spare 
him. 

"  He  was  your  friend  before  he  was  mine.  I  never 
knew  him  till  I  was  married.  It  was  you  who  brought 
him  to  the  house  and  who  seemed  to  wish  me  to  like 
him." 

Glennard  gave  a  short  laugh.  The  defence  was 
feebler  than  he  had  expected :  she  was  certainly  not 
a  clever  woman. 

"  Your  deference  to  my  wishes  is  really  beautiful ; 
but  it 's  not  the  first  time  in  history  that  a  man  has 
made  a  mistake  in  introducing  his  friends  to  his 
wife.  You  must,  at  any  rate,  have  seen  since  then 
that  my  enthusiasm  had  cooled ;  but  so,  perhaps,  has 
your  eagerness  to  oblige  me." 

She  met  this  with  a  silence  that  seemed  to  rob  the 
taunt  of  half  its  efficacy. 

[139] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"  Is  that  what  you  imply  ?  "  he  pressed  her. 

"No,"  she  answered  with  sudden  directness.  "I 
noticed  some  time  ago  that  you  seemed  to  dislike 
him,  but  since  then — " 

"Well— since  then?" 

"I've  imagined  that  you  had  reasons  for  still 
wishing  me  to  be  civil  to  him,  as  you  call  it." 

"Ah,"  said  Glennard  with  an  effort  at  lightness; 
but  his  irony  dropped,  for  something  in  her  voice 
made  him  feel  that  he  and  she  stood  at  last  in  that 
naked  desert  of  apprehension  where  meaning  skulks 
vainly  behind  speech. 

"And  why  did  you  imagine  this?"  The  blood 
mounted  to  his  forehead.  "  Because  he  told  you  that 
I  was  under  obligations  to  him  ?  " 

She  turned  pale.  "  Under  obligations  ?  " 

"Oh,  don't  let's  beat  about  the  bush.  Didn't  he 
tell  you  it  was  I  who  published  Mrs.  Aubyn's  let 
ters  ?  Answer  me  that." 

"  No,"  she  said ;  and  after  a  moment  which  seemed 
given  to  the  weighing  of  alternatives,  she  added: 
"  No  one  told  me." 

[140] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

«  You  did  n't  know,  then  ?  " 

She  seemed  to  speak  with  an  effort.  "Not  until— 
not  until — " 

"  Till  I  gave  you  those  papers  to  sort  ?  " 

Her  head  sank. 

"  You  understood  then  ?  " 

"Yes." 

He  looked  at  her  immovable  face.  "  Had  you  sus 
pected — before  ?"  was  slowly  wrung  from  him. 

"  At  times — yes — ."  Her  voice  dropped  to  a 
whisper. 

"  Why  ?  From  anything  that  was  said — ?" 

There  was  a  shade  of  pity  in  her  glance.  "  No  one 
said  anything — no  one  told  me  anything.11  She 
looked  away  from  him.  "  It  was  your  manner — " 

"  My  manner  ?  " 

"  Whenever  the  book  was  mentioned.  Things  you 
said — once  or  twice — your  irritation — I  can't  ex 
plain." 

Glennard,  unconsciously,  had  moved  nearer.   He 
breathed  like  a  man  who  has  been  running.  "  You 
knew,  then,  you  knew — "  he  stammered.  The  avowal 
[141] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

of  her  love  for  Flamel  would  have  hurt  him  less, 
would  have  rendered  her  less  remote.  "  You  knew — 
you  knew — "  he  repeated ;  and  suddenly  his  anguish 
gathered  voice.  "  My  God ! "  he  cried,  "  you  sus 
pected  it  first,  you  say — and  then  you  knew  it — this 
damnable,  this  accursed  thing ;  you  knew  it  months 
ago — it's  months  since  I  put  that  paper  in  your 
way — and  yet  you've  done  nothing,  you've  said 
nothing,  youVe  made  no  sign,  you've  lived  along 
side  of  me  as  if  it  had  made  no  difference — no  differ 
ence  in  either  of  our  lives.  What  are  you  made  of,  I 
wonder  ?  Don't  you  see  the  hideous  ignominy  of  it  ? 
Don't  you  see  how  you've  shared  in  my  disgrace? 
Or  have  n't  you  any  sense  of  shame  ?  " 

He  preserved  sufficient  lucidity,  as  the  words  poured 
from  him,  to  see  how  fatally  they  invited  her  deri 
sion  ;  but  something  told  him  they  had  both  passed 
beyond  the  phase  of  obvious  retaliations,  and  that  if 
any  chord  in  her  responded  it  would  not  be  that  of 
scorn. 

He  was  right.  She  rose  slowly  and  moved  toward 
him. 

[  142] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"Haven't  you  had  enough — without  that?""  she 
said  in  a  strange  voice  of  pity. 

He  stared  at  her.  "Enough — ?" 

"Of  misery.  .  ." 

An  iron  band  seemed  loosened  from  his  temples. 
"  You  saw  then  .  .  ? "  he  whispered. 

"  Oh,  God— oh,  God — "  she  sobbed.  She  dropped      j 
beside  him  and  hid  her  anguish  against  his  knees. 
They  clung  thus  in  silence  a  long  time,  driven  to 
gether  down  the  same  fierce  blast  of  shame. 

When  at  length  she  lifted  her  face  he  averted  his. 
Her  scorn  would  have  hurt  him  less  than  the  tears 
on  his  hands. 

She  spoke  languidly,  like  a  child  emerging  from  a 
passion  of  weeping.  "  It  was  for  the  money —  ?  " 

His  lips  shaped  an  assent. 

"  That  was  the  inheritance — that  we  married  on  ?  " 

"Yes." 

She  drew  back  and  rose  to  her  feet.  He  sat  watch 
ing  her  as  she  wandered  away  from  him. 

"  You  hate  me,"  broke  from  him. 

She  made  no  answer. 

[143] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

"  Say  you  hate  me  ! "  he  persisted. 

"  That  would  have  been  so  simple,"  she  answered 
with  a  strange  smile.  She  dropped  into  a  chair  near 
the  writing-table  and  rested  a  bowed  forehead  on  her 
hand. 

"  Was  it  much — ?  "  she  began  at  length. 

"Much — ?"  he  returned  vaguely. 

"  The  money." 

"  The  money  ?  "  That  part  of  it  seemed  to  count  so 
little  that  for  a  moment  he  did  not  follow  her  thought. 

"  It  must  be  paid  back,"  she  insisted.  "  Can  you 
doit?" 

"  Oh,  yes,"  he  returned  listlessly.  "  I  can  do  it." 

"  I  would  make  any  sacrifice  for  that ! "  she  urged. 

He  nodded.  "  Of  course."  He  sat  staring  at  her  in 
dry-eyed  self-contempt.  "  Do  you  count  on  its  mak 
ing  much  difference  ?  " 

"  Much  difference  ?  " 

"In  the  way  I  feel — or  you  feel  about  me?" 

She  shook  her  head. 

"  It 's  the  least  part  of  it,"  he  groaned. 

"  It 's  the  only  part  we  can  repair." 
[  144  ] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

66  Good  heavens  !  If  there  were  any  reparation — " 
He  rose  quickly  and  crossed  the  space  that  divided 
them.  "  Why  did  you  never  speak  ?  " 
"  Have  n't  you  answered  that  yourself  ?  " 
"  Answered  it  ?  " 

"  Just  now — when  you  told  me  you  did  it  for  me." 
She  paused  a  moment  and  then  went  on  with  a 
deepening  note — "I  would  have  spoken  if  I  could 
have  helped  you." 

"  But  you  must  have  despised  me."" 
"  I  've  told  you  that  would  have  been  simpler." 
"But  how  could  you  go  on  like  this — hating  the 
money  ?  " 

"I  knew  you'd  speak  in  time.  I  wanted  you, 
first,  to  hate  it  as  I  did." 

He  gazed  at  her  with  a  kind  of  awe.  "You're 
wonderful,"  he  murmured.  "  But  you  don't  yet  know 
the  depths  I  Ve  reached." 

She  raised  an  entreating  hand.  "  I  don't  want  to  ! " 
"  You  're  afraid,  then,  that  you  '11  hate  me  ?  " 
"No — but  that  you'll  hate  me.  Let  me  under 
stand  without  your  telling  me." 
[145] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"You  can't.  It's  too  base.  I  thought  you  didn't 
care  because  you  loved  Flamel." 

She  blushed  deeply.  "  Don't — don't — "  she  warned 
him. 

"  I  have  n't  the  right  to,  you  mean  ?  " 

"  I  mean  that  you  '11  be  sorry." 

He  stood  imploringly  before  her.  "  I  want  to  say 
something  worse — something  more  outrageous.  If 
you  don't  understand  this  you'll  be  perfectly  justi 
fied  in  ordering  me  out  of  the  house." 

She  answered  him  with  a  glance  of  divination.  "  I 
shall  understand — but  you  '11  be  sorry." 

"  I  must  take  my  chance  of  that."  He  moved  away 
and  tossed  the  books  about  the  table.  Then  he  swung 
round  and  faced  her.  "Does  Flamel  care  for  you?" 
he  asked. 

Her  flush  deepened,  but  she  still  looked  at  him 
without  anger.  "  What  would  be  the  use  ?  "  she  said 
with  a  note  of  sadness. 

"  Ah,  I  did  n't  ask  that?  he  penitently  murmured. 

"  Well,  then— " 

To  this  adjuration  he  made  no  response  beyond 
[146] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

that  of  gazing  at  her  with  an  eye  which  seemed  now 
to  view  her  as  a  mere  factor  in  an  immense  redistri 
bution  of  meanings. 

"I  insulted  Flamel  to-day.  I  let  him  see  that  I 
suspected  him  of  having  told  you.  I  hated  him  be 
cause  he  knew  about  the  letters." 

He  caught  the  spreading  horror  of  her  eyes,  and 
for  an  instant  he  had  to  grapple  with  the  new  temp 
tation  they  lit  up.  Then  he  said  with  an  effort — 
"  Don't  blame  him — he 's  impeccable.  He  helped  me 
to  get  them  published;  but  I  lied  to  him  too;  I 
pretended  they  were  written  to  another  man  .  ,  . 
a  man  who  was  dead.  .  ." 

She  raised  her  arms  in  a  gesture  that  seemed  to 
ward  off  his  blows. 

"  You  do  despise  me  ! "  he  insisted. 

"Ah,  that  poor  woman — that  poor  woman — "  he 
heard  her  murmur. 

"I  spare  no  one,  you  see!"  he  triumphed  over 
her.  She  kept  her  face  hidden. 

"  You  do  hate  me,  you  do  despise  me ! "  he 
strangely  exulted. 

[147] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

"  Be  silent ! "  she  commanded  him  ;  but  he  seemed 
no  longer  conscious  of  any  check  on  his  gathering 
purpose. 

"He  cared  for  you — he  cared  for  you,"  he  re 
peated,  "and  he  never  told  you  of  the  letters — " 

She  sprang  to  her  feet.  "How  can  you?"  she 
flamed.  "How  dare  you?  That— I" 

Glennard  was  ashy  pale.  "  It 's  a  weapon  .  .  .  like 
another.  .  ." 

"A  scoundrel's!" 

He  smiled  wretchedly.  "I  should  have  used  it  in 
his  place." 

"  Stephen !  Stephen  ! "  she  cried,  as  though  to 
drown  the  blasphemy  on  his  lips.  She  swept  to  him 
with  a  rescuing  gesture.  "Don't  say  such  things.  I 
forbid  you  !  It  degrades  us  both." 

He  put  her  back  with  trembling  hands.  "  Nothing 
that  I  say  of  myself  can  degrade  you.  We  're  on  dif 
ferent  levels." 

"  I  'm  on  yours,  wherever  it  is  ! " 

He  lifted  his  head  and  their  gaze  flowed  together. 

[148] 


XIV 

THE  great  renewals  take  effect  as  impercepti 
bly  as  the  first  workings  of  spring.  Glennard, 
though  he  felt  himself  brought  nearer  to  his  wife, 
was  still,  as  it  were,  hardly  within  speaking  distance. 
He  was  but  laboriously  acquiring  the  rudiments  of 
a  new  language;  and  he  had  to  grope  for  her 
through  the  dense  fog  of  his  humiliation,  the  dis 
torting  vapor  against  which  his  personality  loomed 
grotesque  and  mean. 

Only  the  fact  that  we  are  unaware  how  well  our 
nearest  know  us  enables  us  to  live  with  them.  Love 
is  the  most  impregnable  refuge  of  self-esteem,  and 
we  hate  the  eye  that  reaches  to  our  nakedness.  If 
Glennard  did  not  hate  his  wife  it  was  slowly,  suffer- 
ingly,  that  there  was  born  in  him  that  profounder 
passion  which  made  his  earlier  feeling  seem  a  mere 
commotion  of  the  blood.  He  was  like  a  child  coming 
back  to  the  sense  of  an  enveloping  presence :  her 
nearness  was  a  breast  on  which  he  leaned. 

They  did  not,  at  first,  talk  much  together,  and 
each  beat  a  devious  track  about  the  outskirts  of  the 
[149] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

subject  that  lay  between  them  like  a  haunted  wood. 
But  every  word,  every  action,  seemed  to  glance  at 
it,  to  draw  toward  it,  as  though  a  fount  of  healing 
sprang  in  its  poisoned  shade.  If  only  they  might  cut 
a  way  through  the  thicket  to  that  restoring  spring ! 
Glennard,  watching  his  wife  with  the  intentness 
of  a  wanderer  to  whom  no  natural  sign  is  negligeable, 
saw  that  she  had  taken  temporary  refuge  in  the  pur 
pose  of  renouncing  the  money.  If  both,  theoretically, 
owned  the  inefficacy  of  such  amends,  the  woman's 
instinctive  subjectiveness  made  her  find  relief  in  this 
crude  form  of  penance.  Glennard  saw  that  she  meant 
to  live  as  frugally  as  possible  till  what  she  deemed 
their  debt  was  discharged ;  and  he  prayed  she  might 
not  discover  how  far-reaching,  in  its  merely  material 
sense,  was  the  obligation  she  thus  hoped  to  acquit. 
Her  mind  was  fixed  on  the  sum  originally  paid  for 
the  letters,  and  this  he  knew  he  could  lay  aside  in 
a  year  or  two.  He  was  touched,  meanwhile,  by  the 
spirit  that  made  her  discard  the  petty  luxuries  which 
she  regarded  as  the  sign  of  their  bondage.  Their 
shared  renunciations  drew  her  nearer  to  him,  helped, 
[150J 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

in  their  evidence  of  her  helplessness,  to  restore  the 
full  protecting  stature  of  his  love.  And  still  they  did 
not  speak. 

It  was  several  weeks  later  that,  one  afternoon  by 
the  drawing-room  fire,  she  handed  him  a  letter  that 
she  had  been  reading  when  he  entered. 

"  I  Ve  heard  from  Mr.  Flamel,"  she  said. 

It  was  as  though  a  latent  presence  had  become 
visible  to  both.  Glennard  took  the  letter  mechanically. 

"  It 's  from  Smyrna,"  she  said.  "Won't  you  read  it  ?" 

He  handed  it  back.  "  You  can  tell  me  about  it — his 
hand's  so  illegible.*"  He  wandered  to  the  other  end 
of  the  room  and  then  turned  and  stood  before  her. 
"  I  Ve  been  thinking  of  writing  to  Flamel,"  he  said. 

She  looked  up. 

"There's  one  point,"  he  continued  slowly,  "that 
I  ought  to  clear  up.  I  told  him  you  'd  known  about 
the  letters  all  along ;  for  a  long  time,  at  least ;  and  I 
saw  how  it  hurt  him.  It  was  just  what  I  meant  to 
do,  of  course ;  but  I  can't  leave  him  to  that  false 
impression ;  I  must  write  him." 
[151] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

She  received  this  without  outward  movement,  but 
he  saw  that  the  depths  were  stirred.  At  length  she 
returned  in  a  hesitating  tone,  "  Why  do  you  call  it 
a  false  impression  ?  I  did  know." 

"  Yes,  but  I  implied  you  did  n't  care."" 

"Ah!" 

He  still  stood  looking  down  on  her.  "Don't  you 
want  me  to  set  that  right  ?  "  he  pursued. 

She  lifted  her  head  and  fixed  him  bravely.  "It 
is  n't  necessary,"  she  said. 

Glennard  flushed  with  the  shock  of  the  retort; 
then,  with  a  gesture  of  comprehension,  "No,"  he 
said,  "  with  you  it  could  n't  be ;  but  I  might  still  set 
myself  right." 

She  looked  at  him  gently.  "Don't  I,"  she  mur 
mured,  "  do  that  ?" 

"  In  being  yourself  merely  ?  Alas,  the  rehabilita 
tion's  too  complete  !  You  make  me  seem — to  myself 
even — what  I'm  not;  what  I  can  never  be.  I  can't, 
at  times,  defend  myself  from  the  delusion ;  but  I  can 
at  least  enlighten  others." 

The  flood  was  loosened,  and  kneeling  by  her  he 
[152] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

caught  her  hands.  "Don't  you  see  that  it's  become 

an  obsession  with  me?  That  if  I  could  strip  myself 

I 

down  to  the  last  lie — only  there  'd  always  be  another  / 

/ 
one  left  under  it ! — and  do  penance  naked  in  the 

market-place,  I  should  at  least  have  the  relief  of 
easing  one  anguish  by  another?  Don't  you  see  that 
the  worst  of  my  torture  is  the  impossibility  of  such 
amends  ?  " 

Her  hands  lay  in  his  without  returning  pressure. 
"  Ah,  poor  woman,  poor  woman,"  he  heard  her  sigh. 

"  Don't  pity  her,  pity  me  !  What  have  I  done  to 
her  or  to  you,  after  all  ?  You  're  both  inaccessible ! 
It  was  myself  I  sold." 

He  took  an  abrupt  turn  away  from  her;  then 
halted  before  her  again.  "How  much  longer,"  he 
burst  out,  "do  you  suppose  you  can  stand  it? 
You  've  been  magnificent,  you  've  been  inspired,  but 
what 's  the  use  ?  You  can't  wipe  out  the  ignominy  of 
it.  It 's  miserable  for  you  and  it  does  her  no  good  ! " 

She  lifted  a  vivid  face.  "That's  the  thought  I 
can't  bear ! "  she  cried. 

"What  thought?" 

[153] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

"That  it  does  her  no  good — all  you're  feeling, 
all  you're  suffering.  Can  it  be  that  it  makes  no  dif 
ference?" 

He  avoided  her  challenging  glance.  "  What 's  done 
is  done,"  he  muttered. 

"Is  it  ever,  quite,  I  wonder?"  she  mused.  He 
made  no  answer  and  they  lapsed  into  one  of  the 
pauses  that  are  a  subterranean  channel  of  communi 
cation. 

It  was  she  who,  after  a  while,  began  to  speak,  with 
a  new  suffusing  diffidence  that  made  him  turn  a 
roused  eye  on  her. 

"  Don't  they  say,"  she  asked,  feeling  her  way  as  in 
a  kind  of  tender  apprehensiveness,  "  that  the  early 
Christians,  instead  of  pulling  down  the  heathen  tem 
ples — the  temples  of  the  unclean  gods — purified 
them  by  turning  them  to  their  own  uses  ?  I  've  al 
ways  thought  one  might  do  that  with  one's  actions 
— the  actions  one  loathes  but  can't  undo.  One  can 
make,  I  mean,  a  wrong  the  door  to  other  wrongs  or 
an  impassable  wall  against  them.  .  ."  Her  voice 
wavered  on  the  word.  "We  can't  always  tear  down 
[154] 


THE    TOUCHSTONE 

the  temples  we  Ve  built  to  the  unclean  gods,  but  we 
can  put  good  spirits  in  the  house  of  evil — the  spirits 
of  mercy  and  shame  and  understanding,  that  might 
never  have  come  to  us  if  we  hadn't  been  in  such 
great  need.  .  ." 

She  moved  over  to  him  and  laid  a  hand  on  his. 
His  head  was  bent  and  he  did  not  change  his  atti 
tude.  She  sat  down  beside  him  without  speaking; 
but  their  silences  now  were  fertile  as  rain-clouds — 
they  quickened  the  seeds  of  understanding. 

At  length  he  looked  up.  "  I  don't  know,"  he  said, 
"  what  spirits  have  come  to  live  in  the  house  of  evil 
that  I  built — but  you're  there  and  that's  enough. 
It 's  strange,"  he  went  on  after  another  pause,  "  she 
wished  the  best  for  me  so  often,  and  now,  at  last, 
it's  through  her  that  it's  come  to  me.  But  for  her 
I  should  n't  have  known  you — it 's  through  her  that 
I've  found  you.  Sometimes — do  you  know? — that 
makes  it  hardest — makes  me  most  intolerable  to 
myself.  Can't  you  see  that  it's  the  worst  thing  I've 
got  to  face  ?  I  sometimes  think  I  could  have  borne 
it  better  if  you  had  n't  understood !  I  took  every- 
[  155  ] 


THE     TOUCHSTONE 

thing  from  her  —  everything  —  even  to  the  poor 
shelter  of  loyalty  she'd  trusted  in — the  only  thing 
I  could  have  left  her! — I  took  everything  from 
her,  I  deceived  her,  I  despoiled  her,  I  destroyed 
her — and  she 's  given  me  you  in  return  ! " 

His  wife's  cry  caught  him  up.  "  It  is  n't  that  she 's 
given  me  to  you — it  is  that  she's  given  you  to  your 
self."  She  leaned  to  him  as  though  swept  forward  on 
a  wave  of  pity.  "  Don't  you  see,"  she  went  on,  as  his 
eyes  hung  on  her,  "that  that's  the  gift  you  can't 
escape  from,  the  debt  you're  pledged  to  acquit? 
Don't  you  see  that  you've  never  before  been  what 
she  thought  you,  and  that  now,  so  wonderfully,  she 's 
made  you  into  the  man  she  loved  ?  That  '<?  worth  suf 
fering  for,  worth  dying  for,  to  a  woman — that's  the 
gift  she  would  have  wished  to  give  ! " 

"  Ah,"  he  cried,  "  but  woe  to  him  by  whom  it 
cometh.  What  did  I  ever  give  her?" 

"The  happiness  of  giving,"  she  said. 

• 

THE    END 


BY   EDITH   WHARTON 

THE  GREATER  INCLINATION 

12mo  $1.50 

CONTENTS 

The  Muses  Tragedy  A  Journey 

The  Pelican  Souls  Belated 

A  Coward  The  Twilight  of  the  God 

A  Cup  of  Cold  Water  The  Portrait 

OPINIONS  OF  THE  PRESS 

ir 

Eight  pieces  of  delicate  texture  and  artistic  conception.  Every 
one  of  them  has  the  external  shape  and  coloring  of  the  world  in 
which  we  mingle  day  by  day,  and  every  one  of  them  is  at  heart 
a  poignant  spiritual  tragedy.  This  may  sound  like  extravagant 
praise,  but  no  conventional  commendation  would  be  adequate 
for  such  a  book.  Between  these  stories  and  those  of  the  ordi 
nary  entertaining  sort  there  is  a  great  gulf  fixed.  —  The  Dial. 

IT 

Marked  by  great  technical  skill,  by  keen  humor,  and  by  a  style 
which  is  individual  and  striking.  There  is  a  quality  of  distinction 
about  her  work  not  merely  of  style  but  of  character.  —  The  New 

York  Sun. 

IT 

This  book  of  short  stories  comes  out  of  America,  and  it  is  good. 
It  is  very  good.  Mrs.  Wharton  is  one  of  the  few  to  grasp  that  ob 
vious  but  much  neglected  fact  that  the  first  business  of  a  writer 
is  to  be  able  to  write.  "The  Greater  Inclination"  is  distinguished 
and  delightful.  —  The  Academy. 

ir 

If  we  were  to  single  out  one  book  from  those  that  have  been 
published  this  season  as  exhibiting  in  the  highest  degree  that 


rare  creative  power  called  literary  genius,  we  should  name  "The 
Greater  Inclination,"  by  Mrs.  Edith  Wharton.  —  The  Bookman. 

IT 

Her  style  is  as  finished  as  a  cameo,  and  there  is  nowhere  an 
indication  of  haste  or  crudity  or  the  least  inattention  to  detail. 
Only  a  woman  to  the  manner  born  in  society,  a  woman,  too, 
whose  literary  favorites  or  her  literary  masters  may  have  been 
Thackeray  or  James,  since  she  partakes  of  the  spirit  of  the  one, 
and  has  followed  the  exquisite  workmanship  of  the  other,  could 
have  written  "The  Pelican"  or  "Souls  Belated."— Literature. 

IT 

Mrs.  Wharton  has  not  only  observed  people  carefully,  but  has 
really  perceived  the  subtle  significance  of  their  ordinary  as 
pects,  so  that  her  figures  are  not  only  individuals  but  types. 
This  sympathetic  and  suggestive  portrayal  and  the  generally 
optimistic  and  moral  tone  make  "The  Greater  Inclination"  a 
book  of  really  great  value.  — Boston  Transcript. 

f 

Mrs.  Wharton  shows  us  so  much  delicacy  of  touch,  so  much 
clarity  and  neatness  of  style,  and  at  times  so  much  profundity 
of  comprehension  as  to  make  her  volume  quite  unique  among 
the  books  that  have  been  sent  to  us  this  year.  .  .  .  We  could 
go  on  quoting  indefinitely,  so  full  is  Mrs.  Wharton's  book  of 
thoughts  that  are  startlingly  original  in  substance  and  given 
with  a  most  vivid  sense  of  form  ;  but  we  prefer  to  commend  the 
volume  most  unreservedly  to  every  reader,  since  nothing  that 
we  have  seen  this  year  in  fiction-writing  has  seemed  to  us  so 
memorable,  both  in  its  choice  of  subjects,  its  mastery  of  style, 
and  its  piquant  art  that  makes  one  think  and  wonder.  — N.  Y. 
Commercial  Advertiser. 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS,  PUBLISHERS 
153-157  FIFTH  AVENUE,  NEW  YORK 


D.  B.  Updike 

The  Merrymount  Press 

Boston 


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*C  JAN  12  34 

Aur  n  n 

"<ju  a  ( 

1998 

U.C.BERKELEY  LIBRARIES 


